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THE 



CHRISTIAN SABBATH 

ITS NATURE, DESIGN 



PROPER OBSERVANCE. 



BY THE 



Rev. K. L. DABNEY, D.D., LL.D., 

Professor op Systematic and Pastoral Theology in the Union 
Theological Seminary, Hamp den-Sidney, Va. 




SEP 28 1882 



PHILADELPHIA : 
PRESBYTERIAN BOARD OF PUBLICATION, 

No. 1334 Chestnut Street. 



COPYRIGHT, 1882, BY 

THE TRUSTEES OP THE 

PRESBYTERIAN BOARD OF PUBLICATION. 



ALL BIGHTS RESERVED. 







"Westcott & Thomson, 
Stereotypers and Electrotypers, Philada. 



THE CHRISTIAN SABBATH: 

Its Nature, Design and Proper Observance. 



IT must be confessed that the Christian world now 
presents an anomalous condition touching the 
Sabbath. Strict Protestants usually profess in the- 
ory the views once peculiar to Presbyterians, and 
admit that the proper observance of the Sabbath 
is a bulwark of practical Christianity. But their 
practice does not always correspond with their the- 
ory. In actual life there is, among good people, a 
great uncertainty, with a corresponding confusion 
of usages, from great laxity up to the sacred strict- 
ness of our pious forefathers. It is greatly to be 
feared that those in the Church who tolerate this 
laxity are increasing in numbers and influence. 
The civil law, which guarantees the Sabbath rest 
to all as a secular benefit and right, is enforced with 
more and more difficulty, especially in populous 
places; and this law is disregarded with increas- 
ing boldness by powerful corporations and by those 
who offer amusements and sensual enjoyments to the 
public. Hence the wisest friends of truth and good 
have taken the alarm. The aim of this treatise is 

3 



4 THE CHRISTIAN SABBATH 

to give some humble help in this good cause by 
proving the divine and perpetual authority of 
God's holy day. 

It will appear singular to the thoughtful ob- 
server that the consciences of devout and sincere 
persons leave them room for such license in their 
Sabbath observance, while in all other things they 
show themselves honest Christians, sincerely gov- 
erned by their convictions of truth and duty. The 
explanation is, that men's convictions touching the 
claims of the Sabbath are not clear. And this con- 
fusion of opinions is to be traced to a fact of which 
many, perhaps, who experience its injurious effects 
are not aware — that the Protestant communions 
founded after the great Reformation were widely 
and avowedly divided in their opinions on this 
duty. In our mixed population in America the 
descendants of these different communions live dis- 
persed among each other, and oftentimes are found 
in the same churches. They have lost sight of the 
opposing doctrines, the one asserting that the Lord's 
day is still God's Sabbath, and the other denying it 
— doctrines once honestly held by their, respective 
forefathers. But the usages, strict or loose, which 
consistently flowed from these convictions, scriptural 
or erroneous, cleave to the descendants. These lax 
customs, by example, influence multitudes of other 
Christians. Thus, many persons weakly lapse into 
breaches of the Sabbath law for which they have 
not even the partial excuse of an erroneous opinion 



THE CHRISTIAN SABBATH 5 

honestly adopted; and they violate their own pro- 
fessed doctrine, feebly and unintelligently held, 
with a looseness of conscience greater than that of 
the European Protestants whom we condemn for 
avowedly neglecting the Sabbath. Hence, a brief 
historical statement will be instructive, and will 
prepare the way for our appeal to God's word. It 
will not be necessary fbr the^ purpose in view to en- 
cumber this statement with names and authorities, 
or to detail the names of the churches and men who 
held the one or the other side. 

It may be said, in general terms, that since the 
days of primitive Christianity there has existed a 
difference of opinion in the Christian world as to 
the authority upon which the Lord's day should be 
observed. The Reformation did not extinguish, but 
rather defined and fixed, that difference. The wrong 
side, as we conceive it, was held not only by papists, 
but by some of the great Reformers, and error was 
by them planted in some of the Protestant churches. 
According to that opinion, the sanctification of one 
day from every seven was a ceremonial, typical and 
Levitical custom, and it was therefore abrogated 
when a better dispensation came, along with other 
shadows of spiritual blessings. These persons ad- 
mit that the Lord's day deserves observance as a 
Christian festival, because it is a weekly memorial 
of the blessed resurrection, and because the exam- 
ple of the Church and the enactments of her synods 
support it, but not because it is now a commandment 



6 THE CHRISTIAN SABBATH 

of God. Weekly rest from worldly labors is a so- 
cial and civil blessing, they say, very properly se- 
cured by the laws of the commonwealth, and so 
long as these laws are in force every good citizen 
must of course comply with them. Public and 
associated worship of God is also a scriptural duty 
of Christians. But in order that they may join in 
these acts of worship they must agree upon some 
stated day and place ; and what day so suitable as 
this first day of the week, which is already made a 
day of leisure from secular cares by the law of the 
commonwealth, crowned with pious associations and 
commemorative of the grand event of the gospel 
history, Christ's rising from the dead ? But this, 
they say, is all. To sanctify the whole day as a re- 
ligious rest under the supposed authority of a divine 
command is judaizing ; it is burdening our necks 
with the bondage of a merely positive and typical 
ceremony which belonged to a darker dispensa- 
tion. 

The second opinion is that embodied in the West- 
minster Confession ; and to the honor of the Pres- 
byterian branches of the Protestant body it may be 
asserted that these have been, since the Reformation, 
the most intelligent and decided supporters of it. 
These Christians believe that the sanctification of 
some stated portion of time, such as God may select, 
to his worship, is a duty of perpetual obligation for 
all ages, dispensations and nations, as truly as the 
other unchangeable duties of morals and religion ; 



THE CHRISTIAN SABBATH. 7 

and that the Sabbath command has been to this ex- 
tent always a " moral " one, as distinguished from a 
" positive,* ceremonial " one. They believe that God 
selected one-seventh as his proper portion of time 
at the creation, at Sinai, and again at the incom- 
ing of the last dispensation. But when the cere- 
monial law was for a particular, temporary purpose 
added to the original, patriarchal dispensation, the 
seventh day became also for a time a Levitical holy 
day and a type. This temporary feature has of 
course passed away with the Jewish institutions. 
Upon the resurrection of Christ the original Sab- 
bath obligation was by God fixed upon the first day 
of the week, because this day completed a second 
work even more glorious and beneficent than the 
world's creation by the rising of Christ from the 
tomb. Hence, from that date to the end of the 
world the Lord's day is, by divine and apostolic 
authority, substantially what the Sabbath day was 
originally to God's people. It is literally the 

* Most of God's commands are simply expressions of the es- 
sential and unchangeable rightness of the things commanded, 
as when we are enjoined to speak truth and love God. These 
precepts divines call "moral" or "permanent moral." The 
things are commanded because they are right in themselves. 
But some things God commands or forbids for wise reasons 
which, without his precept, would not be of themselves right 
or wrong. Such was the prohibition to the Jews to eat swines' 
flesh. These precepts the divines term " positive." The things 
are right or wrong only so long as, and only because, God en- 
joins and prohibits them. Many ceremonial commands, rules 
about ceremonies, are of this kind. 



8 THE CHRISTIAN SABBATH 

" Christian Sabbath," and is to be observed with 
the same sanctity as it was by the patriarchs. 

The great synod which most truly in modern ages 
propounded this doctrine of the Lord's day was the 
Westminster Assembly. Its Confession of Faith is 
now the standard of the Scotch, the Irish and the 
American Presbyterian churches, as well as of some 
independent bodies. It puts the truth so luminously 
that its words, though familiar to many readers, are 
repeated here as the best statement of what is to be 
proved in the subsequent discussion : * 

" As it is of the law of nature that in general a 
due proportion of time be set apart for the worship 
of God, so in his word, by a positive, moral and 
perpetual commandment, binding all men in all 
ages, he hath particularly appointed one day in 
seven for a Sabbath, to be kept holy unto him, 
which, from the beginning of the world to the res- 
urrection of Christ was the last day of the week, and 
from the resurrection of Christ was changed into the 
first day of the week, which in Scripture is called 
the Lord's day, and is to be continued to the end 
of the world as the Christian Sabbath. 

" The Sabbath is then kept holy unto the Lord 
when men, after a due preparing of their hearts and 
ordering of their common affairs beforehand, do not 
only observe an holy rest all the day from their own 
works, words and thoughts about their worldly em- 
ployments and recreations, but also are taken up 
* Westminster Confession of Faith, xxi v £§ 7, 8, 



THE CHRISTIAN SABBATH 9 

the whole time in the public and private exercises of 
his worship and in the duties of necessity and mercy." 

The attempt will now be made to give a brief 
and plain statement of the grounds upon which this 
position rests. And, 

First. The Sabbath law is contained in the Dec- 
alogue. None will dispute this proposition : That 
if this is "a positive, moral and perpetual com- 
mandment, binding all men in all ages," the change 
from the Jewish to the Christian dispensation has 
not removed its divine authority over us. Not be- 
ing "positive and ceremonial" like the Jewish 
rules of meats, new moons and sacrifices, it has not 
passed away along with the other Jewish shadows. 
Let us, then, test the truth of the former position — 
that the Sabbath command in the Decalogue was 
" moral and perpetual." 

The argument w r ill pursue this plain and fair 
course: If this command was not for the first time 
introduced by the Levitical economy, but was in 
full force before, and if it was binding not on Jews 
only, but on all men, then the abrogation of that 
dispensation cannot have abrogated it, because it 
did not institute it. 

We are but using logic parallel to that which the 
apostle Paul employs in a similar case. He is prov- 
ing that the gospel promise made to the Hebrews 
in Abraham could not have been retracted when 
the law was published on Sinai. His argument is 
(Gal. 3 : 17): "The covenant that was confirmed 



10 THE CHRISTIAN SABBATH. 

before of God in Christ, the law, which was four 
hundred and thirty years after, cannot disannul." 
So reason we : If the Sabbath was instituted long 
before, it did not come with Judaism, and does not 
go with it. It is instructive to note that those Chris- 
tian Fathers who gave countenance to the idea that 
the divine injunction of the Sabbath was abrogated 
also leaned to the opinion that the Sabbath was of 
Mosaic origin. This indirectly confirms the sound- 
ness of our inference, while it betrays their slender 
acquaintance with the Old-Testament Scriptures. 
The anti-Sabbath opinion in the Christian Church 
had its origin in error and ignorance among the 
early, uninspired teachers. 

It may be argued that the Sabbath is of moral and 
perpetual authority from these facts : There is a reason 
in the nature of things, making such an institution 
essential to man's religious welfare and duty ; and 
this necessity is substantially the same in all ages and 
nations. That it is man's duty to worship God none 
with whom we now deal will dispute. Nor will it 
be denied that this worship should be in part social, 
because man is a being of social affections and sub- 
ject to social obligations, and because one of the 
great ends of worship is the display of the divine 
glory before our fellow-creatures. Social worship 
cannot be conducted without the appointment of a 
stated day ; and who can authoritatively appoint 
that day except the God who is the object of the 
worship? For the cultivation of our individual 



THE CHRISTIAN SABBATH. 11 

devotion and piety a periodical season is absolutely 
necessary to creatures of habit and finite capacities 
like us. What is not regularly done will soon be 
omitted, for we are dependent on habit ; and of this 
periodical recurrence is the very foundation. We 
are by nature carnal and sensuous beings ; we are 
prone to walk by sense instead of faith. The things 
which are seen, but temporal, are ever obscuring the 
things which are unseen, but eternal. If such crea- 
tures were left to themselves to appropriate to spir- 
itual interests only such irregular seasons as they 
should select of their own motion, it is very plain 
that the final issue would be the total neglect and 
omission of the interests of eternity. This conclu- 
sion is fully confirmed by experience, for among 
nominal Christians, where the Sabbath is entirely 
neglected, the result is always a practical godless- 
ness among the people; and it is believed that even 
among Mohammedans and pagans the employment 
of some stated holy days has been found essential to 
the existence of those religions. The tribes which 
have no holy day, the obligation of whose observ- 
ance is believed by them to be from their gods, are 
those which, like the Bushmen of South Africa 
and the Australian blacks, are almost as devoid of 
religious ideas and as degraded as the apes of their 
native wilds. It seems absolutely necessary that 
man's unstable religious sentiments be fixed for 
him by having them attached by divine authority 
to a sacred day and an appointed worship. 



12 THE CHRISTIAN SABBATH 

But it is a well-known maxim in morals that 
when a certain work is obligatory, the necessary 
means for its performance are equally obligatory. 
The question whether the Sabbath command is 
moral or positive seems, therefore, to admit of a 
very simple solution. Whether one day in six or 
one in eight might not have seemed to the divine 
wisdom admissible for its purpose, or which day of 
the seven, the first or the last, should be consecrated 
to it, or what ought to be the particular forms of its 
worship, — these things, we admit, are of merely pos- 
itive institution, and may be changed by the divine 
Legislator. But that man shall have his stated pe- 
riod of worship enjoined upon him is as truly a dic- 
tate of the natural conscience and as immediate a 
result of our relation to God as that man shall 
worship his God at all. And no reason can be 
shown why this obligation was more or less strin- 
gent upon Israelites of the Mosaic period than on 
men before or since them. 

Having found the observance of some stated and 
recurring season essential to that worship of God 
which is naturally and perpetually incumbent on 
us, Ave ask, By whom shall the season be selected 
and enforced ? — by man or by God ? If the great 
duty of worship is essentially and morally binding, 
this necessary provision for compliance is also essen- 
tially and morally binding. Whose is the reason- 
able and natural authority for providing and enfor- 
cing it? — the creature's or the Lord's? To ask this 



THE CHRISTIAN SABBATH 13 

question is to answer it. Obviously, this provision 
ought to be fixed by the Lord, to whom the wor- 
ship is due. It is his right to settle it. He alone 
has the authority to enforce it. The purposes of 
social and concerted worship require uniformity in 
the season. Now, the Jew says each seventh day, 
the Christian says that each first day, is the proper 
season. If this is left to mere human authority, the 
Christian has no more right to dictate his preference 
to the Jew than the Jew to force his on the Chris- 
tian. No uniformity can be had. Clearly, the select- 
ing and enforcing of the proper day does not belong 
to Jew or Christian, but to the divine Lord. 

We argue, further, that the enactment of the Sab- 
bath law does not date from Moses, but was coeval 
with the human race. It is one of the first two in- 
stitutions of Paradise. The sanctification of the 
day took place from the very end of the week of 
creation. For whose observance was the day, then, 
consecrated or set apart, if not for man's ? Not for 
God's observance, because the glorious paradox is 
for ever true of him that his blessed quiet is as 
everlasting as his ceaseless activity. Not for the 
angels', surely. But for Adam's. Doubtless, Eden 
witnessed the sacred rest of him and his consort from 

"the toil 
Of their sweet gardening labor, which sufficed 
To recommend cool zephyr, and made ease 
More easy, wholesome thirst and appetite 
More grateful." 



14 THE CHRISTIAN SABBATH 

And from that time downward we have indications, 
brief indeed, but as numerous as we can expect in 
the compendious record of Genesis, and sufficient 
to show us that the Sabbath continued to be an 
institution of the patriarchal religion. A slight 
probable evidence of this may be seen in the fact 
that seven has ever been a sacred and symbolical 
number among ancient patriarchs, Israelites and 
pagans. In Genesis we read of the " seven clean 
beasts/' the " seven well-favored" and "seven lean 
kine," the "seven ears of corn rank and good." 
Now, there is no natural sign in the heavens or 
earth to suggest the number, for no heavenly body or 
natural element revolves in precisely seven months, 
days joy hours, nor do any of man's external mem- 
bers number seven. Whence, then, the peculiar 
idea attached so early to the number, if not from 
the institution of the week for our first parents? 
But to proceed to more solid facts. The "end 
of days" or "return of days" (Gen. 4 : 3), rendered 
in our version "process of time," at which Cain and 
Abel offered their sacrifices, was most likely the end 
of the week, the Sabbath day. In Gen. 7 : 10 we 
find God himself observing the weekly interval in 
the preparations for the Flood. We find another 
clear hint of the observance of this weekly division 
of time by Noah and his family in their floating 
prison. In Gen. 8 : 10-12 the patriarch twice 
waited a period of seven days to send out his dove. 
From Gen. 29 : 27 we learn that it was customary 



THE CHRISTIAN SABBATH 15 

among the patriarchs of Mesopotamia in the days 
of Laban to continue a wedding-festival a week; 
and the very term of service rendered by Jacob for 
his two wives shows the use made of the number 
seven as the customary duration of a contract for 
domestic service. Gen. 50 : 10 shows us that at the 
time of Jacob's death a week was also the length of 
the most honorable funeral exercises. In Ex. VI : 
3-20 we find the first institution of the passover, 
when as yet there w T ere no Levitical institutions. 
This feast was also appointed to last a week. In 
JEx. 16 : 22-30, where we read the first account of 
the manna, we find the Sabbath observance already 
in full force ; and no candid mind will say that this 
is the history of its first enactment. It is spoken 
of as a rest with which the people ought to have 
been familiar. But the people had not yet come to 
Sinai, and none of its institutions had been given. 
Here, then, we have the Sabbath rest enforced on 
Israel before the ceremonial law was set up, and 
two weekly variations wrought in the standing mir- 
acles of the manna in order to facilitate its observ- 
ance. 

This fact is so fatal to the doctrine that the Sab- 
bath was only a Levitical ordinance that opponents 
have attempted to deny the force of it. They say 
that Moses now, for the first time, anticipating the 
law of Sinai by a few days, gave the Hebrews the 
Sabbath on the occasion of the manna's beginning: to 
fall. They would have us believe that the people 



16 THE CHRISTIAN SABBATH. 

had never heard of the Sabbath before. This con- 
struction they force on the twenty-third verse: 
"And he said unto them, This is that which the 
Lord hath said : To-morrow is the rest of the holy 
Sabbath unto the Lord/' etc. But we answer: 
Moses does not say or imply that this was the first 
time the Lord said the seventh day was holy. On 
the contrary, the drift of the whole narrative shows 
that the Lord was now, by Moses, referring the peo- 
ple to their former knowledge of the sanctity of the 
Sabbath as an explanation of their finding no manna 
on that day. No fair reader can compare the words 
with Gen. 2 : 3 without seeing this. But especially 
does the twenty-second verse of chap. 16 prove our 
view and refute the other. The people had, on the 
sixth day, already begun to make preparations for 
the rest of the seventh by gathering two portions 
of manna, before Moses or the elders had said one 
word to them about it ! Their doing so was what 
prompted the elders to make the inquiry of Moses. 
Thus it appears beyond question that the Hebrews 
did know of God's command to hallow the Sab- 
bath, and were in the general (not universal) habit 
of honoring it, before ever the manna had fallen or 
Moses had said a word about the duty. 

But let us proceed to Sinai. When the Sabbath 
command is there repeated it is stated in terms 
which clearly imply that it was known before and 
that its obligation was only reaffirmed. The fourth 
command begins : " Remember the Sabbath day to 



THE CHRISTIAN SABBATH. 17 

keep it holy." It is not accurate to call on people 
to remember what they had never heard before. 
None of the other commands begin thus. But 
others, if not all, of them were old commands, 
known to God's people before. Yet the fourth 
alone begins with the call to remember. This 
makes the language more expressive, and it indi- 
cates plainly this thought : that in the fourth com- 
mandment God considered himself as only requiring 
the same duty taught to Adam. 

It is argued, further, that the very fact that this 
precept has its place in the awful " Ten Words " is 
itself evidence enough that it is no mere positive 
and ceremonial command, but one moral and per- 
petual. 

Confessedly, there is nothing else ceremonial here. 
An eminent distinction was given to these ten com- 
mands by the mode in which God delivered them. 
They were given first of all the laws enacted at 
Horeb. They were spoken in the hearing of all 
the people by God's own voice of thunder, which 
formed its tremendous sounds into syllables so loud 
that the whole multitude around the base of the 
mount heard them break articulate from the cloud 
upon its peak. "These words the Lord spake 
unto all your assembly in the mount, out of the 
midst of the fire, the cloud, and the thick darkness, 
with a great voice ; and he added no more " (Deut. 
5 : 22). No other words shared the same distinc- 
tion. 



18 THE CHRISTIAN SABBATH 

Then they were engraved, by God's own agency, 
on two stone tables, whose durability was to rep- 
resent the perpetual obligation of all that was writ- 
ten upon them. How can it be believed that one 
ceremonial precept was thrust in here where all else 
is of obligation as old and as universal and as last- 
ing as the race ? There is no ceremonial rule on 
the two tables. This conclusion is confirmed by 
another fact : the two tables were made " tables of 
the testimony," and for holding them the sacred ark 
was made, called the " ark of the testimony," cov- 
ered with the mercy-seat and crowneci by the She- 
kinah, the bright symbol of God's presence. This 
fact showed that this law written on the stones was 
the permanent bond of God's covenant with his 
Church — the very law which the great, divine 
High Priest came to honor, and whose breaches 
are covered only by the blood of Calvary. 

We find, again, that the ground assigned in the 
commandment is the same as in Genesis, and is in 
no sense Jewish or local or temporary. God's work 
of creation in six days and his rest upon the sev- 
enth have just as much relation to one tribe of 
Adam's descendants as to another. To appreciate 
the force of this we must notice, on the other hand, 
that when ceremonial commands are given which 
are peculiar to the Jews, such as the passover, a 
Jewish event is assigned as its ground, as the de- 
liverance from Egypt. 

The early traditions of the pagans are, of course, 



THE CHRISTIAN SABBATH. 19 

of no divine authority to us, yet they give an in- 
teresting support to the lesson taught us in Genesis 
and Exodus, showing that even these idolaters once 
knew that the Sabbath was a primeval institution 
ordained for all nations. No one will imagine that 
Homer and Hesiod, for instance, borrowed from the 
Old Testament sabbatical allusions which would 
have been unintelligible to their pagan readers. 
These poets evidently refer to the popular tradi- 
tions w T hich these Greek descendants of Japheth 
carried to the " isles of Chittim." A few of the 
early allusions to a Sabbath will be borrowed from 
the writings of Clement of Alexandria, a learned 
Christian of the second century, inasmuch as he 
has made them ready to our hands. He remarks : 
" That the seventh day is sacred, not the Hebrews 
only, but the Gentiles also, acknowledge, according 
to which the whole universe of living and vegeta- 
ble things revolve. Hesiod, for instance (Dierum 
6), says of it, ' The first and the fourth and the sev- 
enth also is a sacred day/ And again he exclaims : 
( The seventh day once more, the splendid dawn of 
the sun.' And Homer sings, 'The seventh then 
arrived, the sacred day/ Again, ' The seventh was 
sacred/ Once more, 'The seventh dawn was at 
hand, and with this all this series is completed/ " 
Clement also quotes the poet Callimachus as say- 
ing, " It was now the sabbath day, and with this all 
was accomplished." "The seventh day is among 
the fortunate ; yea, the seventh is the parent day/ 



I 

20 THE CHRISTIAN SABBATH. 

" The seventh day is the first, and the seventh is 
the complement." " This day the elegies of Solon 
also proclaim as more sacred, in a wonderful mode." 
Thus far Clement, Proeparatio Evang. 

The ancient Jewish historian Josephus, in his 
last book against Apion, affirms " that there could 
be found no city, either of the Grecians or barba- 
rians, who owned not a seventh day's rest from 
labor." The learned Jew Philo called it the " fes- 
tival of all nations." 

The most emphatic uninspired testimony is also 
the most valuable because of its antiquity. The 
late Mr. George Smith, famous for his Assyrian 
researches, says: "In the year 1869, I discovered, 
among other things, a curious religious calendar 
of the Assyrians, in which every month is divided 
into four weeks, and the seventh days, or ( sabbaths/ 
are marked out as days on which no work should 
be undertaken" (Assyrian Discoveries, p. 12). H. 
Fox Talbot, in his translation of these Creation- 
tablets, renders two lines thus : 

" On the seventh day he appointed a holy day, 
And to cease from all business he commanded," 

He also says : " This fifth tablet is very important, 
because it affirms clearly, in my opinion, that the 
origin of the Sabbath was coeval with the crea- 
tion." So the Eev. A. H. Sayce (Trans. Soc. Bibl. 
Arch., vol. v., Pt. II., pp. 427, 428). Mr. Sayce 
has translated the rules for each day of the month. 



THE CHRISTIAN SABBATH 21 

Those for the seventh day (which is called " sab- 
bath " and " day of completion") forbid the prince 
on that day to eat cooked fruits and birds, to change 
his garments, to legislate or appoint officeholders, to 
take medicine ; and requires him to make his sacri- 
fice to God on that day. 

There is another convincing proof that the Sab- 
bath never was a merely Levitical institution which 
is found in the fact that in the very law of the Dec- 
alogue God commands its observance equally by 
Jews and Gentiles : " In it thou shalt not do any 
work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy man- 
servant, nor thy maid-servant, nor thy cattle, nor 
thy stranger that is within thy gates" This stranger 
was the foreigner residing in the land of Israel. 
To see the convincing force of this fact the reader 
must contrast the jealous care with which the 
" stranger," the pagan foreigner sojourning in Jew- 
ry, was excluded from all share in the Levitical 
worship. No foreigner could partake of the pass- 
over ; it was sacrilege. It was at the peril of his 
life that he presumed to enter the inner courtyard 
of the temple, where the bloody sacrifice was offer- 
ed. Now, when this foreigner is required to keep 
the Sabbath along with the families of Israel, does 
not this prove that rest to be no ceremonial, no 
type like the passover and the altar, but a univer- 
sal moral institution designed for all nations and 
times? 

Once more : That the Sabbath of the Decalogue 



22 THE CHRISTIAN SABBATH 

was not a ceremonial command is proved by the 
fact that its violation was made a capital offence. 
(See Ex. 31 : 14.) No ceremonial command was 
thus enforced. Even circumcision, fundamental as 
it was to the whole economy, was not thus fenced 
up. Its neglect of course excluded a man from 
the Church, but it incurred no capital penalty. 

Care has been taken to establish this assertion 
on an immovable basis, because the inference from 
it is so direct. If the Sabbath command was in 
full force before Moses, the passing away of Moses' 
law did not revoke it. If it always was binding, 
on grounds as general as the human race, over all 
tribes of mankind, the dissolution of God's special 
covenant with the family of Jacob did not repeal 
it. If the nature of the Sabbath is moral and 
practical, then the substitution of the substance for 
the types did not supplant it. The ceremonial laws 
were temporary, because the need for them was tem- 
porary. They were removed because the Church 
no longer required them. But the practical need 
for a Sabbath is the same in all ages. When we 
are made to see that the sanctification of this day is 
the bulwark of practical religion in the world ; that 
it goes hand-in-hand everywhere with piety and the 
true knowledge of God; that where there is no 
Sabbath there is at last no Christianity, — it becomes 
incredible to us that God would make the institu- 
tion temporary. The necessity for a Sabbath has 
not ceased ; therefore the command has not been 



THE CHRISTIAN SABBATH 23 

revoked. It is a perpetual moral command, and 
moral commands are as incapable of repeal as the 
nature of God, on which they are founded, is of 
change. Hence we conclude that the command, 
" Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy," 
stands just as binding upon us now as any other 
of the ten. The New-Testament writers and our 
Lord Jesus always speak of the other nine com- 
mands, and comment upon them, as permanent and 
unalterable : " It is easier for heaven and earth to 
pass than one tittle of the law to fail." The Sab- 
bath command stands as one among the precepts 
of this permanent law, resting on grounds equally 
moral and universal. 

But it is objected that the seventh-day Sabbath 
is declared to have been to the Hebrews a peculiar 
institution, and even a sign or type, having the 
ground of its injunctions in their own special his- 
tory, and enjoined only as a badge of their own 
special theocratic covenant with God. Thus, in 
Deut. 5 : 15 the deliverance from Egypt is men- 
tioned as the ground of the command : "And re- 
member that thou wast a servant in the land of 
Egypt, and that the Lord thy God brought thee out 
thence through a mighty hand and by a stretched- 
out arm ; therefore the Lord thy God commanded 
thee to keep the Sabbath day." It is sought to push 
this text to mean that to the rest of God's people, 
who did not share the exodus from Egypt, there 
is no ground for observing any Sabbath. 



24 THE CHRISTIAN SABBATH 

That this is utterly foreign from Moses* intent 
appears thus : The exodus from Egypt is the ex- 
press preface to the first command (and so to the 
whole Decalogue), both here in Deut. 5 : 6 and in 
Ex. 20 : 2. This notable argument would prove, 
then, were it worth anything, that because we did 
not share the exodus from Egypt we are not bound 
by the great command against idolatry, nor indeed 
by any of the Decalogue ! It is worthless. 

Again : In Ex. 20 : 11 a worldwide and perma- 
nent ground for the Sabbath command is assign- 
ed : " For in six days the Lord made heaven and 
earth," etc , while nothing is said about the exodus. 
The explanation is clear. The Hebrews had all 
the reasons to keep the Sabbath which the whole 
human race has — God's sanctifying it at the cre- 
ation of the race and commanding it to all the race. 
But they had this additional reason : that God had 
now blessed them above all other tribes. Hence 
they were bound by gratitude also to keep the Sab- 
bath. 

Again : It is objected that God made the Sab- 
bath iC a sign " between him and the Hebrews (Ex. 
31 : 13, 17; Ezek. 20 : 12, 20). The attempt is 
made to infer hence that the Sabbath was a mere 
type to the Hebrews, and thus has passed away 
like all the other types, since the antitype, Christ, 
came. Again I reply : If its being " a sign " be- 
tween God and Israel proves it a type, then the 
same argument proves that the great first law of 



THE CHRISTIAN SABBATH. 25 

love itself was a type, and has been abrogated ; for 
in Deut. 6 : 8, Israel is commanded to make this 
"a sign." Such is the absurdity of this argument. 
Moreover : the Decalogue itself is called again and 
again " the testimony/' and the very chest in which 
the two tablets of stone, written with the command- 
ments, were kept, is called the " ark of the testi- 
mony" (Ex. 25 : 16, 21 j 31 : 18; 32 : 15; 34 : 
29 ; Ps. 78 : 5). If the reader would see how near 
this word " testimony " is to the other word " sign," 
let him read Josh. 22 : 26-34. (The word is the 
same in the main.— -Ed.) Let him compare also 
Ruth 4 : 7, where the shoe u was a testimony in 
Israel." The idea of the "sign" between God 
and Israel, and of the witness between them, is 
there nearly the same. Hence I argue again : If 
the Sabbath being "a sign" proves it a mere 
type, the Ten Commandments being a " testimony " 
or " witness " proves themselves a mere type. 

To understand this "sign" we must remember 
that all the world except the Hebrews had gone 
off into idolatry, neglecting all God's laws and also 
the proper observance of his Sabbath. The cove- 
nant which Israel made with him was, to be sep- 
arate from all the pagans and to obey his law, so 
neglected by them. Now, the public observance 
of the Sabbath gave the most obvious, general, vis- 
ible sign to the world and the Church of this cove- 
nant, and of the difference between God's people 
md pagans. Hence it was eminently suitable as a 



26 THE CHRISTIAN SABBATH. 

sign of that covenant. The human race is still 
divided between the world and the Church; and 
holy Sabbath observance ought to be precisely such 
a "sign " of the Church's relation to her God now. 
This simple view relieves the whole question. The 
general apostasy of the nations made this duty of 
visible Sabbath-keeping, which God enjoins on all 
men of all ages, a badge and mark of those who 
still fear him. 

It should be noted also that the phrase "sab- 
baths/' as used in the Pentateuch, means the other 
Jewish festivals as well as the seventh day. Thus 
in Lev. 25 : 2, 4 " sabbath v means the sabbatical 
year. In Lev. 19 : 3, 30 it probably includes all 
the annual festivals of religion. In Lev. 16 : 31 
it means the great day of atonement, which, com- 
ing on the tenth day of the seventh month each 
year, might be any other day as well as the seventh. 
In Lev. 23 : 24 it means the day of the new moon, 
which might be on any day of the week. 

Finally, the subsequent parts of the Old Testa- 
ment teach us that Sabbath observance was, to the 
believing Hebrew, a spiritual and not a ceremonial 
duty. The ninety-second Psalm is entitled, by in- 
spiration, "A psalm or song for the Sabbath day." 
Every sentiment there is evangelical, and the be- 
liever's chief joy in the day is in the foretaste it 
gives of the everlasting rest. 

In Isa. 56 : 4-8 we have the following words : 
"For thus saith the Lord unto the eunuchs that 



THE CHRISTIAN SABBATH. 27 

keep my Sabbaths and choose the things that please 
me, and take hold of my covenant ; even unto them 
will I give in mine house, and within my walls, a 
place and a name better than of sons and of daugh- 
ters : I will give them an everlasting name that 
shall not be cut off. Also the sons of the stranger 
that join themselves to the Lord, to serve him, and 
to love the name of the Lord, to be his servants, 
every one that keepeth the Sabbath from polluting 
it, and taketh hold of my covenant; even them 
will I bring to my holy mountain, and make them 
joyful in my house of prayer : their burnt-offerings 
and sacrifices shall be accepted upon mine altar : for 
mine house shall be called a house of prayer for all 
people. The Lord God which gathereth the out- 
casts of Israel saith : Yet will I gather others to 
him, beside those that are gathered unto him." 

Let it be noted that here Sabbath observance re- 
ceives a blessing for Gentiles as well as Jews, and 
that this blessing is associated with that full ingath- 
ering of Gentile believers which was predicted to 
attend the Messianic dispensation, when Zion should 
be a house of prayer for all nations. How could 
words more strongly indicate that the Sabbath be- 
longs to both dispensations ? 

But the language of Isa. 58 : 13, 14 is still 
stronger: "If thou turn away thy foot from the 
Sabbath, from doing thy pleasure on my holy day ; 
and call the Sabbath a delight, the holy of the Lord, 
honorable ; and shalt honor him, not doing thine 



28 THE CHRISTIAN SABBATH 

own ways, nor finding thine own pleasure, nor 
speaking thine own words ; then shalt thou delight 
thyself in the Lord ; and I will cause thee to ride 
upon the high places of the earth, and feed thee with 
the heritage of Jacob thy father : for the mouth of 
the Lord hath spoken it." 

Let the reader observe here that the main scope 
of this fifty-eighth chapter of Isaiah is to dissuade 
the Jews from a ceremonial righteousness by show- 
ing its worthlessness when unaccompanied by spirit- 
ual holiness. They are ardently urged to offer God, 
instead of ritual service, the duties of inward right- 
eousness, and especially of charity. To these the 
blessing is promised. Now, it is in this connection 
that the prophet also urges a spiritual Sabbath ob- 
servance, and to it he repeats the same promises. 
He also connects this right kind of Sabbath observ- 
ance immediately with the glorious Messianic tri- 
umphs of Zion, which, as we know from all the 
subsequent history, occur only under the new dis- 
pensation. ' Nowhere does Isaiah better deserve 
than here the title of "the evangelical prophet." 
It is simply impossible for the candid reader to 
take in the anti-ceremonial aim of the whole pas- 
sage, and to believe that Isaiah here thought of 
Sabbath observance as only a typical duty. 

II. But it is said that the New Testament does 
repeal the obligation of the Sabbath, and that in 
the face of this new teaching of Christ and his 



THE CHRISTIAN SABBATH. 29 

apostles the plainest seeming inferences must give 
way. Let us, then, in the second place, consider 
these passages carefully and candidly. Let us 
weigh them honestly, listen fairly to all that the 
learned enemies of the Sabbath have to argue from 
them, and grapple manfully with their real teach- 
ings. We will refer the reader to every verse in the 
New Testament which has been supposed to bear on 
the question. 

The first we notice are those contained, with some 
slight variations, in the parallel places of Matt. 12 : 
1-8 ; Mark 2 : 23-28 ; Luke 6 : 1-5. Matthew's 
narrative is, on the whole, the fullest : 

"At that time Jesus went on the Sabbath day 
through the corn [wheat or barley] ; and his disci- 
ples were an hungered, and began to pluck the ears 
of corn, and to eat. But when the Pharisees saw 
it, they said unto him, Behold, thy disciples do that 
which is not lawful to do on the Sabbath day. But 
he said unto them, Have ye not read what David 
did, when he was an hungered, and they that were 
with him ; how he entered into the house of God, 
and did eat the shew-bread, which was not lawful 
for him to eat, neither for them which were with 
him, but only for the priests? Or have ye not 
read in the law, how that on the Sabbath days the 
priests in the temple profane the Sabbath, and are 
blameless ? But I say unto you that in this place is 
One greater than the temple. But if ye had known 
what this meaneth, I will have mercy, and not sac- 



30 THE CHRISTIAN SABBATH 

rifice, ye would not have condemned the guiltless. 
For the Son of man is Lord even of the Sabbath 
day." 

Now, it is claimed that these words of our Sa- 
viour modify and, to a certain extent, repeal the 
Sabbath law with a view to the new dispensation. 
The attempt is made to sustain this by pointing to 
the fact that Jesus here illustrates his point by re- 
ferring to two other merely ceremonial or positive 
instances; by which they think he intimates that 
the Sabbath was as much a positive ceremony as the 
shew- bread, and thus as reasonably liable to repeal. 

The reader, upon supplying from the second and 
third evangelists what is omitted in the first, will 
find that our Lord advances five distinct ideas. 

His hungry disciples, passing along the footpath 
through the fields of ripe grain, had availed them- 
selves of the permission of Deut. 23 : 25 to pluck, 
rub out and eat some grains of wheat or barley as 
a slight refreshment. The Pharisees, eager to find 
fault, caviled that Christ had thus permitted his 
followers to break the Sabbath law by preparing 
food in sacred time, making this ado about the 
plucking, rubbing and winnowing of a few heads 
of grain with their hands as they walked. In de- 
fence of them and himself our Saviour says, in the 
first place, that their hunger was a necessity which 
justified their departure from the letter of the law 
in this case, as did David's necessity when, fleeing 
for his life, he innocently used the shew-bread to 



THE CHRISTIAN SABBATH 31 

appease his hunger. Second, that the example of 
the priests, who performed necessary manual labor 
about the temple (such as skinning and dressing the 
sacrifices, cleaning the altar and such like) on the 
Sabbath, and were blameless, justified what his dis- 
ciples had done. Third, that God prefers compli- 
ance with the spirit of his law, calling for human- 
ity, love and mercy, to mere observance of its outer 
form. For, fourth, God's design in instituting the 
Sabbath had been a humane one, seeing he designed 
it not, as the Pharisees regarded their observances, as 
a galling asceticism, burdensome to the worshiper 
and ministering only to his self-righteousness, but 
as a means of promoting the true welfare of his 
servants. And lastly, that he himself, as the Mes- 
siah, was the supreme and present authority in 
maintaining the Sabbath law, as well as all others 
of his laws ; so that it was enough that he acquitted 
his disciples of sin ; and this pretended zeal for God 
in the presence of the supreme Lawgiver, God in- 
carnate, was officious and impertinent. Had his 
disciples really committed an infraction of his Sab- 
bath law, he could have seen to his own rights and 
honor without the Pharisees' deceitful help. The 
consistency of this simple view with itself, and the 
.perfectness of its logic in rebuking the cavilers, are 
a sufficient proof of its faithfulness to the Saviour's 
meaning. 

Now, the modern opponents of our doctrine 
would have us believe that our Saviour here exerts 



32 THE CHRISTIAN SABBATH. 

his Messianic authority to introduce, for the first 
time, the freer and more lenient law of the Sabbath 
for the new dispensation, and to repeal the Mosaic. 
It will appear that this is a sheer blunder, a bald 
misconception of the whole case ; and the short and 
simple proof is, that the Sabbath, as it ought to be 
observed by Jews under the Mosaic laws, is what our 
Saviour is here expounding. The new dispensation 
had not yet come, and was not to begin until Pen- 
tecost. After all this discussion Jesus Christ scru- 
pulously observed every point of the Mosaic law 
up to his death. He was engaged in the celebra- 
tion of a Mosaic ordinance, the passover, at the very 
hour his murderers were arranging for his destruc- 
tion ; it was the last free act of his life. The whole 
Scriptures concur in teaching us that the change of 
dispensation resulted only from his death and resur- 
rection. Until those acts were completed the types 
were unfulfilled, and the grounds of the old dispen- 
sation all remained. At the time of this discussion 
Christ was living as a member of the Jewish Church, 
for our sakes "fulfilling all its righteousness." If, 
then, anything were here relaxed, it would be the 
Mosaic Sabbath, as Jews should keep it, which is 
the subject of alteration. But there is no repeal of 
anything; only an explanation. To represent the* 
passage as a change of an Old-Testament law for 
Old-Testament members would not help the cause 
of our opponents a particle; and, moreover, it is a 
thing which could not happen, as the Old-Testa- 



THE CHRISTIAN SABBATH 33 

merit laws were all perfectly permanent until the 
time came for the change of dispensation. 

The careful reader will see that our Saviour does 
not plead for any relaxation of the Sabbath law in 
favor of his disciples ; he only asks a correct expo- 
sition. The whole drift of his argument is to prove 
that w T hen it is correctly understood how God in- 
tended Jews to keep his Sabbath law, it will appear 
that his disciples have not, by this act, broken it at 
all. They need no lowering of its claims in order 
to escape condemnation. 

Bearing this important fact in mind, let us pro- 
ceed to the second erroneous inference. This is, 
that our Saviour, by illustrating the Sabbath law 
from two ceremonial instances, intimates that the 
Sabbath also was but a Jewish ceremony. But 
when one observes how the Jewish Scriptures com- 
mingle what we call " moral " and " positive " pre- 
cepts, and how uniformly the Hebrew mind seems 
to ignore the distinction, this inference will be seen 
to be utterly worthless. The Jew, in his practical 
views of duty, never paused to separate the two 
classes of precepts. Thus, Moses in Exodus con- 
nects solemn prohibitions against idolatry with in- 
j unctions not to hew the stones for an altar, against 
eating flesh torn of beasts in the field and bearing 
false witness. Ezekiel (ch. 18) conjoins eating upon 
the mountains and taking interest upon a loan with 
idolatry and oppression, in his charges against the 
Jews of his day. Yea, we see the apostles them- 



34 THE CHRISTIAN SABBATH. 

selves (Acts 15) warning the Gentile believers in 
the same breath against fornication and eating a 
strangled fowl. We do not argue from these facts 
against the existence of our distinction of " moral " 
from " positive;" we only show how utterly unwar- 
rantable it is to argue that both of two precepts 
must be positive only because the sacred writers 
connect the one with another which is such. 

It is inferred again, from Christ's third remark, 
that the Sabbath command must be ceremonial, be- 
cause he teaches that the obligation for its observ- 
ance should give place to that of mercy. This, they 
suppose, must be on the principle that positive or 
ceremonial commands give place to those which 
are moral and perpetual. One reply is, that so do 
moral duties of a lower grade give place to those 
of a higher in some cases. Thus, there is a nat- 
ural, moral and perpetual obligation to worship 
God, yet any and every form of God's worship 
would be righteously suspended for a time to save 
a man perishing in the water. This duty of hu- 
manity would take precedence of the other duty 
of religious worship for the time, because of its 
greater urgency; an hour later God might still 
be worshiped acceptably, but the man would be 
drowned. Pro v. 21 : 3 expresses precisely this 
truth in these words : " To do justice and judgment 
is more acceptable to the Lord than sacrifice." 
Both in this place, and in our Saviour's citation 
from the prophet Samuel (whose words he quotes), 



THE CHRISTIAN SABBATH 35 

"sacrifice" stands for religious worship in general. 
This, surely, is not a duty merely ceremonial and 
positive, yet it is righteously postponed to mercy. 
Then, our Saviour's postponing a given point of 
Sabbath observance to mercy does not prove that 
this is merely ceremonial and positive. 

A second answer is, that circumstances may greatly 
modify the details of duties of the most permanent 
character. Does any one dispute that the obliga- 
tion to " honor his parents" is a moral and perma- 
nent one of very high order? If parents are aged 
and dependent, this honor doubtless includes main- 
tenance. Thus, it might be a most urgent and bind- 
ing duty of a son in England to furnish his aged pa- 
rents with fuel, while no such obligation would rest 
on the son of such parents in India, because in that 
w T arm climate nobody needs or uses fires in the sit- 
ting-rooms. How simple is this ! Then it is equal- 
ly plain that no one is entitled to infer that the Sab- 
bath command is only ceremonial because circum- 
stances alter the times and details of observance. 

But the force of the inference is entirely destroyed 
by the fact that it was not a failure of Sabbath ob- 
servance which Christ was excusing. He declares 
that there had been no delinquency. The accused 
disciples were " guiltless." He explains their act 
as an incidental labor of necessity, strictly consist- 
ent with proper Sabbath observance. There was 
no overriding of one obligation by another more 
imperious to be explained. 



36 THE CHRISTIAN SABBATH 

The perverted gloss of the fourth point, "The 
Sabbath was made for man/' is almost too shallow 
to need exposure. These writers seem to think 
that our Saviour meant that God did not design to 
cramp any man by the Sabbath *4aw, but to allow 
it to yield in every way to the creature's conveni- 
ence and gratification.. But what Christ here says 
is that the design of the Sabbath is a humane one — 
that is, man's true welfare. Then it must be settled 
what that true welfare is, and how it may be best 
promoted, before we may conclude that God allows 
us to do what we please with his holy day. If it 
turns out that man's true welfare imperatively de- 
mands a Sabbath day, fenced with divine authority 
and faithfully observed, then the humanity of God's 
motive in appointing it will argue anything else than 
this license inferred from it. It may be added that 
a moment's thought of the Pharisees' religious system 
will show us what ideas our Saviour was exploding 
by the statement that " the Sabbath was made for 
man." The religion of that austere and proud sect 
was intensely self-righteous and formal, and, to a 
certain degree, ascetic. It was a religion not of 
love and holiness, but of fear and slavish forms. 
Their idea of a religious observance was not that 
of a blessed means of grace, but of an ascetic bur- 
den, by bearing which a man might imagine he 
was making merit, and that a merit proportioned 
to the irksomeness and difficulty of the form he 
forced himself to go through with. Now, such 



THE CHRISTIAN SABBATH. 37 

people as these would very naturally think that the 
more burdensome they made their Sabbaths to them- 
selves by heaping on particulars of man's invention, 
the more merit they would get. Hence they blamed 
the disciples for their little act of labor. Our Sa- 
viour evidently designs by these words to teach 
them that they wholly misunderstood the purpose 
of the Mosaic Sabbath. God did not require the 
Hebrews (nor any one else) to keep it as a means of 
ascetic self-punishment, like the papist's hair shirt ; 
but he required them to keep it intelligently and 
from the heart, as an appointed and blessed means 
of grace. The pangs of hunger may be a very fit 
self-punishment if the purpose is that of the self- 
righteous monk, to make a fancied merit by tortur- 
ing himself for nothing. But as there is no true 
religion in bodily hunger, and as it ordinarily in- 
terferes with Bible-study and devotion, of course 
God's idea in giving the Hebrews a Sabbath to 
sanctify implied that a proper part of that sancti- 
fication was for them to eat when they really needed 
to eat. 

But we turn our Saviour's declaration, that " the 
Sabbath was made for man" directly against its ad- 
versaries. The word " man " is used in its generic 
sense — the race. Here, then, we are divinely taught 
that the Sabbath was made not for the Jews, but for 
the race, which is precisely our doctrine. 

The concluding words of our Saviour in Matthew 
have suggested an argument which is a little more 



38 THE CHRISTIAN SABBATH. 

plausible. We even find one of the great Reform- 
ers paraphrasing those words thus: "The Son of 
man, agreeably to his authority, is able to relax the 
Sabbath day just as the other legal ceremonies." 
And again : " Here he saith that power is given to 
him to release his people from the necessity of ob- 
serving the Sabbath." The inference he would 
draw is, that then the Sabbath must be a ceremo- 
nial institution, for w T e have ourselves argued that 
moral and permanent laws are founded on the 
unchangeable nature of God, and will never be 
changed, because he cannqt change. But we deny 
the exposition. It gives an utterly mistaken and 
perverted view of our Saviour's real meaning. Our 
Saviour's own words are : " For the Son of man is 
Lord even of the Sabbath" Now, the conjunction 
"for" w 7 as undoubtedly our Lord's own word, 
and he makes it emphatic. But these expositors 
strangely and criminally neglect its force altogether. 
We see how an erroneous notion of the meaning 
blinded them. All careful students of the Bible 
know that this conjunction "for" is usually placed 
by a sacred writer to introduce the words which 
state the ground or reason of that which he had 
just asserted : " Watch, therefore, for ye know 
neither the day nor the hour when the Son of man 
cometh." The fact that we do not know the day is 
given as the reason why we are told to watch. It 
is always safest criticism to give a word its usual 
force if the sense of the passage will bear it. Let 



THE CHRISTIAN SABBATH. 39 

us do so here. Then the meaning is, that the Mes- 
siah's being Lord of the Sabbath day is the reason 
why these disciples are innocent. 

The Saviour's reasoning is in substance this : 
" These men, blamed by you Pharisees, are inno- 
cent. I saw them pluck and eat the grain. It is 
enough that I did not forbid them, for I am the 
Lord of this Sabbath day. This law is my law. 
I was the person who published it from the top of 
Mount Sinai (as the divine Angel of the covenant). 
It is my authority which sustains it. Hence, if I 
am satisfied with this act of these men, that is proof 
enough of their innocence." 

Such reasoning is clear ; and it is conclusive and 
unanswerable, as the arguments of the Saviour al- 
ways are when properly understood. Does not this 
show that we explain him aright ? 

But if the reader will attend we will show that 
the sense placed on our Saviour's words by these ex- 
positors cannot be right. They make him contradict 
himself. He says, first, that the disciples were inno- 
cent, that they needed no excuse; and then they 
make him say that " he will excuse them by alter- 
ing the law in their favor, as he has a right to do." 
The one ground contradicts the other. This expla- 
nation would represent the Saviour as stultifying 
himself by his own words, as we sometimes hoar 
foolish and false children and servants do, when, 
being charged with an offence, they first deny it 
and then make an excuse for it. Were such an 



40 THE CHRISTIAN SABBATH. 

explanation willfully urged for Christ's words, it 
would be profane. 

Another proof that they do not represent Christ's 
words aright is in the fact that Christ did not at that 
time use his Messianic authority to repeal any Mo- 
saic institution whatever, TJie repeal never began 
until after his resurrection. It is well known that, 
on the contrary, he taught his followers to give an 
exemplary compliance with the Levitical laws in 
every respect until he had " caused the sacrifice and 
oblation to cease" by " bringing in everlasting right- 
eousness." 

Every gloss which has any bearing against the 
morality and perpetuity of the Sabbath command 
has been thus removed from these passages in the 
Gospels. The statement of our Saviour's argument 
which we gave at the beginning of the explanation 
is seen to be consistent and scriptural. This is one 
of the best tests of its truth. But the reader is en- 
treated to remember that, let the explanation of our 
Saviour's reasons be what it may, we are bound to 
hold that it was the true nature of the Mosaic Sab- 
bath which he was unfolding. It was the Sabbath 
as binding on Jews under the old dispensation which 
he was explaining. So that, let them prove what 
they may, they have proved nothing whatever as 
to the manner in which Christians under the new 
dispensation are required to keep the Sabbath, 
whether more strictly or more loosely. If they 
succeed by their erroneous criticism in persuading 



THE CHRISTIAN SABBATH 41 

themselves that Christ here relaxed the Sabbath law, 
the only consequence is the unfortunate one of mak- 
ing Christ appear to contradict his own inspired 
prophets. 

This may be a convenient place to notice a sup- 
posed difficulty attending our argument. It is said, 
" If you deny that Christ gives any relaxation of 
the stringency of the Levitical Sabbath as of a cer- 
emonial yoke, then in consistency you must exact 
of Christians now as punctilious an observance in 
every respect as was required of the Jews. You 
must allow people to make no fire- in their dwell- 
ings on the Sabbath. You will seek to re-enact 
the terrible law of Num. 16, which punished a 
wretch with death for gathering a few sticks on 
the Sabbath day." 

This is only skillful sophistry. No one has as- 
serted that all the details of the Sabbath law in all 
the books of Moses are of perpetual authority. It 
has not been denied that at the epoch of Sinai the 
Sabbath, a holy day for all mankind already, be- 
came in addition a sign and a day of typical wor- 
ship to the " peculiar people." The two instances 
mentioned are the only plausible ones which can be 
advanced against us ; and it must be noticed that 
they are not taken from the Decalogue, but from 
subsequent revelations which contain many ceremo- 
nials and peculiar political rules suited to Hebrews 
only. No one argues, for instance, as to the second 
commandment — which all admit to be of perpetual 



42 THE CHRISTIAN SABBATH. 

and moral authority — that it perpetuates all the rites 
of the altar for ever. The Westminster Catechism 
declares that the purpose of the second command- 
ment is to require the " keeping pure and entire 
all such religious worship and ordinances as God 
hath appointed in his word." After the twentieth 
chapter of Exodus there follow in the same book 
many ordinances enjoining bloody sacrifices, in- 
cense and shew-bread. No one has been so heed- 
less as to think these ritual details were intended 
by God to be explicative of the perpetual obligation 
of " keeping pure and entire" his appointed divine 
worship. Why should they commit the similar 
folly in the fourth commandment? We repeat: 
The moral and perpetual obligation is what was 
spoken by the Messiah's own voice from the top 
of Sinai in the " Ten Words," and what was carved 
by his own fingers on the imperishable stone. What 
follows in the Levitical books may be only explica- 
tive of ritual details appropriate to the Jews, like 
the incense and shew-bread. Whether a given de- 
tail is such, or is explicative of the permanent part 
of the obligation, this must be found out, not by 
rashly " jumping to a conclusion," but by the 
careful and faithful comparison of scripture with 
scripture. 

Now, in the Sabbath command that which is of 
perpetual moral obligation is what is founded on 
the rights of God and the nature of man ; and this 
is the true sanctification to his public and private 



THE CHRISTIAN SABBATH 43 

worship of such stated times as he claims. This 
he tells us is one day out of seven. Other details 
that follow may or may not be ritual. 

There are several scriptural facts which give us a 
safe guidance as to these details. 

First. The Sabbath became to the Jew at the Mo- 
saic epoch not only what it had always been to all 
men — a sacred day of worship-*— but a sign and a day 
of sacrifices. It ranked with his new-moon days. 
This must attach to its observance, for a Jew, fea- 
tures of exactness and mechanical regularity above 
what its moral observance required. 

Next. The government was a theocracy ; no line 
whatever separated the secular and sacred statutes. 
The God who was the religious object of the He- 
brews' worship was also the political king of the 
commonwealth. He was setting up a very strict 
ritual for the purpose of making a rigid separation 
between the Hebrews and the pagans around them. 
Hence, willful breaches of ordinances bore the char- 
acter of treason against the divine King of the na- 
tion, and might be naturally and properly punished 
as capital crimes. Idolatry and persuading another 
to idolatry were capital crimes in the theocracy, and 
properly so. But it would not be proper for the 
State of California to punish the Chinese there for 
their idolatry with death, because that State is not 
a theocracy, and Church and State are properly 
separate. So, the State of Virginia ought not to 
punish Sabbath-breaking in its worst form with 



44 THE CHRISTIAN SABBATH, 

death. Of course, it will not punish capitally the 
gathering of sticks to make a fire on the Sabbath. 
The Christian Church has no power of corporal 
punishment for any crime. 

Third. Hebrew houses had no hearths or chim- 
neys except for cooking, because in that mild cli- 
mate the people made no use of fire in their sitting- 
rooms. Hence the injunction to make no fire in 
their dwellings on the Sabbath day amounted pre- 
cisely to an injunction not to cook food on that day. 
There is a wide and necessary difference in the spe- 
cies of food on which civilized man subsists in our 
latitude and the national food of ancient Israel. 
This, with the necessary use of fuel in winter 
among us, may make some slight difference of de- 
tail in the application of the Jewish rule against 
cooking food on the Sabbath, especially for the sick 
and infirm. But as to the spirit of the prohibition, 
it ought undoubtedly to be held among us, as among 
the Jews, that with these exceptions no culinary 
labors should have place on the Sabbath. To allow 
ourselves further license in this is to palter with the 
essential substance of the perpetual command — the 
sanctification of one whole day out of seven from all 
secular labors, except those of necessity and mercy, 
to God's religious service. These culinary labors, 
as pursued in so many families in America and 
Britain even, are a robbery of servants, depriving 
them of their Sabbath, and a transgression of God's 
will, for the mere indulgence of luxury in eating. 



THE CHRISTIAN SABBATH. 45 

This sin doubtless cries to God fearfully, even from 
these Protestant lands. 

The only other places in the New Testament 
which can be used against our theory of Sabbath 
obligation are from the Epistles. They also form a 
group, and may be viewed together. 

Rom. 14 : 5, 6: "One man esteemeth one day 
above another : another esteemeth every day alike. 
Let every man be fully persuaded in his own jraind. 
He that regardeth the day regardeth it unto the 
Lord ; and he that regardeth not the day, to the 
Lord he doth not regard it. He that eateth, eateth 
to the Lord, for he giveth God thanks ; and he that 
eateth not, to the Lord he eateth not, and giveth 
God thanks." Gal. 4:9-11: " But now, after that 
ye have known God, or rather are known of God, 
how turn ye again to the weak and beggarly ele- 
ments, whereunto ye desire again to be in bondage ? 
Ye observe days, and months, and times, and years. 
I am afraid of you, lest I have bestowed on you 
labor in vain." Col. 2 : 16, 17 : "Let no man there- 
fore judge you in meat, or in drink, or in respect of 
a holy day, or of the new moon, or of the Sab- 
bath days : which are a shadow of things to come ; 
but the body is of Christ." 

Those who oppose the divine obligation of the 
Christian Sabbath make the following use of these 
passages : They say that they find in them the same 
two arguments seen in the passages from the evan- 
gelists : first, that the apostle calls the Sabbath a 



46 THE CHRISTIAN SABBATH 

shadow or type, and we know that the types are 
abolished ; second, that, the apostle here discusses 
Sabbath observance on the same footing with the 
distinctions of clean and unclean meats, which shows 
that he thought of the Sabbath only as a positive 
and ceremonial command. They also claim that 
the apostle here, by his inspired authority, abol- 
ishes all distinctions of days whatsoever from that 
time .onward, and absolutely makes all days alike 
for Christians. Their account of this amazing rev- 
olution is the following : The old dispensation, they 
say, was dark, unspiritual, slavish, adapted to the 
Church in its infancy, and hence burdened with 
many grievous rites which were in themselves of 
no real spiritual use to souls; but they served to 
keep the stupid and childish minds of the Old-Tes- 
tament worshipers reminded of the curse of a broken 
law under which they lay, and anxious for the gos- 
pel deliverance. When that deliverance came, say 
they, all these burdensome shadows were lifted off; 
they had fulfilled their purpose ; and among them 
was removed all obligation to keep any one day as 
more sacred than another day. This, say they, fol- 
lows from the truth that gospel love and gratitude 
in a pardoned and sanctified believer's heart conse- 
crates every day. He "does all for the glory of 
God." His ploughing and building and buying 
and selling are all done in a devout spirit; they are 
all a worship of God. Every day is to him virtu- 
ally a Sabbath day, and thus there is no room for 



THE CHRISTIAN SABBATH. 47 

a distinction of days under the new dispensation. 
Hence they charge that he who transfers the di- 
vine obligation of the seventh day to the first, and 
regards the Lord's day as a divine, Christian Sab- 
bath, is but judaizing. He is still in bondage; he 
has not come out into the liberty and love of the 
gospel, and he does not even understand it. 

But we ask them whether the apostle in these 
very passages (Rom. 14 : 5, 6) does not allow the 
keeping of days, and admit that he that does it 
"keepeth them to the Lord"? And do not these 
very divines hold that the Church does right to 
make the Lord's day a day of leisure and of public 
worship? And do they not also keep Easter and 
Whitsuntide, two days of mere human appoint- 
ment? They have an answer ready. They say, 
Yes; the leisure is a benefit and respite to domes- 
tic servants and work-animals. Some day must be 
agreed on by human ecclesiastical authority for con- 
certed public worship. And, chiefly, the apostle 
sets them the example of allowing a distinction of 
days to weaker Christians who have not attained to 
that higher experience which can make every day a 
Sabbath, which is the proper standard of the new 
dispensation. The apostle remarks that while some 
Christians — those, namely, of higher attainments — 
" regard every day alike," others — the weaker and 
foolisher-— "esteem one day above another." The 
wiser must make allowances for the weaker, and 
permit, or even encourage, them to employ these 



48 THE CHRISTIAN SABBATH 

Jewish crutches for their weakness until they can 
get upon better grounds of religious experience. 

Such is the view of the three passages taken by 
this class of writers. 

The first remark we make upon it is that, whether 
we can advance a better one or not, theirs cannot 
stand. For, first, it undertakes expressly to repeal 
one command and expunge it from the Decalogue. 
It arrays Paul against Christ. Christ put that com- 
mand in the "Ten Words/' which contained nothing 
but the perpetual moral law; he carved them in 
stone, a symbol of their perpetuity; they came 
from the immediate mouth of God, who "spake no 
more," spake no mere ceremonial matter in this 
way ; he imposed this command on foreigners, who 
were neither required nor permitted to observe the 
ceremonial commands while Gentiles. But this 
scheme represents Paul as putting the Sabbath 
command among mere ceremonials. Now, it is not 
to be believed that two inspired by the same God 
contradicted each other, or that a part of that law 
has been abolished of which our Saviour declared, 
" Heaven and earth shall pass before one jot or tittle 
of it shall fail." 

Second. The reason assigned by these writers for 
thinking the Sabbath of divine appointment unsuit- 
able for the gospel dispensation is foolish. God 
thought that a Sabbath day suited our holy first 
parents in Paradise. Is the Christian experience 
of any poor, fallen sinner who has become a gospel 



THE CHRISTIAN SABBATH 49 

believer higher and purer than that of Adam while 
he was "in the image and likeness of God"? Do 
any of these more thoroughly consecrate their com- 
mon labor, and make every working day a Sabbath 
day more, than Adam did ? Yet God thought Adam 
needed a literal Sabbath, one day in seven. Or we 
might show the foolishness of this view by compar- 
ing ourselves with Old-Testament saints. Was the 
Psalmist, who wrote the one hundred and sixteenth 
Psalm — was holy Isaiah, such a stranger to grace, to 
gratitude, to gospel self-dedication, that he did not 
know how to consecrate his whole life to his Sa- 
viour ? Surely no sinner saved by grace under the 
gospel ever had a soul more baptized with these 
blessed affections than David and Isaiah. In fact, 
when a believer now desires to pour out his love and 
gratitude to his God, he usually borrows the hymns 
of Old-Testament devotion in which to do it. Yet 
nobody disputes that God required David and Isaiah 
to keep a Sabbath day. 

The truth is, that this feeble notion had its origin 
among a school of half-reformed divines who were 
heretical as to the gospel character of the old dis- 
pensation, and who even held that believers under 
it had no certain gospel light or hope, and that the 
dispensation was not a spiritual one at all. We 
cannot thus contradict both Testaments ; and to us, 
therefore, this dream that a regular holy day is un- 
suited to the more spiritual and thankful experience 
of the new dispensation can only be absurd. 

4 



50 THE CHRISTIAN SABBATH. 

Third. A just view of human nature and of re- 
ligious experience proves that believers of all ages 
do need a regular Sabbath day — that it is useful, 
yea, necessary, for them, and a blessing to their 
souls. Man is a creature of habit; he is a finite 
creature; he cannot do two things at the same time. 
His soul needs just such an ordinance. 

The reader must note that the Bible speaks of the 
Sabbath not as a ritual burden laid on the neck of 
the Church because it was in its minority, but as a 
privilege and a blessing. We are " to call the Sab- 
bath a delight, holy to the Lord, and honorable " 
(Isa. 58 : 13); "Blessed is the man .* . . that keep- 
eth the Sabbath from polluting it" (Isa. 56 : 2); 
"The Sabbath was made for man" (Mark 2 : 27) ; 
" The Lord blessed the Sabbath day, and hallowed 
it" (Ex. 20 : 11). The argument is this : Since the 
Sabbath is a needed blessing, if God has abrogated 
the Jewish Sabbath and given to us no Christian 
Sabbath in place of it, the new dispensation is less 
blessed than the old. But who can admit this? 
Did kings and prophets desire to see the less blessed 
day rather than their own ? The new dispensation 
is always represented in the Bible as more blessed 
than the old, more crowned with privilege and bet- 
ter furnished with means of grace. 

Fourth. This view represents the apostle, an in- 
spired man, as setting up a standard of Christian 
experience which was found in practice unsuited to 
human nature. That Christians did observe sacred 



THE CHRISTIAN SABBATH 51 

days in the apostle's time these writers admit, and 
also that the usage was approved. But they say it 
was not founded on any divine authority ; the apos- 
tle had just repealed all that. Then on whose au- 
thority ? That of the uninspired Church. Their 
view, then, is, that the apostle, sweeping away all 
Sabbaths and Lord's days, invites Christians to as- 
cend to his lofty and devoted experience, which had 
no use for a set Sabbath because all his days were 
consecrated. But as it was found that this did not 
suit the actual Christian state of most Christians, 
human authority was allowed, and even encour- 
aged, to appoint Sundays, Easters and Whitsuntides 
for them. The objections are: First, that this coun- 
tenances " will-worship," or the intrusion of man's 
inventions into God's service ; second, it is an im- 
plied insult to Paul's inspiration, assuming that he 
made a practical blunder, which the Church synods, 
wiser than his inspiration, had to mend by a human 
expedient ; and third, we have here a practical con- 
fession that, after all, the average New-Testament 
Christian does need a stated holy day, and there- 
fore the ground of the Sabbath command is per- 
petual and moral. 

For these reasons it is impossible for us to agree 
that the apostle Paul meant what these men say. 
What, then, did he mean in the three passages? 
A few historical facts will plainly tell us; and 
these facts are not disputed by those who differ 
from us. 



52 THE CHRISTIAN SABBATH 

After the new dispensation was set up, the Chris- 
tians converted from among the Jews had generally 
combined the worship of Judaism with that of Chris- 
tianity. They observed the Lord's day, baptism and 
the Lord's Supper, but they also continued to keep 
the seventh day, circumcision and the passover. Nor 
was this wrong for them during the transition state. 
Acts (ch. 21) tells us that the apostle Paul did so 
himself. But at first it was proposed by them to 
enforce this double system on all Gentile Christians 
as a permanent one. Of this plan we have the full 
history in Acts 15, where it was rebuked by the 
apostles and elders at Jerusalem. A certain part 
of the Jewish Christians (out of which ultimately 
grew the Ebionite sect) continued, however, to ob- 
serve the forms of both dispensations, and restless 
spirits among the churches planted by Paul, which 
contained both Jewish and Gentile members, con- 
tinued to make trouble on this point. Some of 
them conjoined with this Ebionite view the graver- 
heresy of justification by the merit of ritual and 
ascetic observances, as we see in the Epistles to the 
Galatians and Colossians. Thus at that day this 
spectacle was exhibited : In the mixed Christian 
churches some brethren went to the synagogue on 
Saturday and to the church on Sunday, keeping 
both days holy. Other brethren (Gentiles) paid no 
respect to Saturday, and kept only Sunday. Others 
again (Jews) felt bound to keep not only Saturday 
and Sunday, but all the Jewish sacred times — the 



THE CHRISTIAN SABBATH 53 

new moons, the paschal, pentecostal and atonement 
feasts and the sabbatical years. Here was ground 
of difference and of mutual accusations. This was 
the mischief to which the apostle had to bring a 
remedy. We may add that the question about 
clean and unclean meats was mingled with that 
about Jewish days. Was it right now for any 
Jewish Christian to do as the Gentile Christians did 
— use bacon, lard and the butcher's meat of animals 
which had been killed at pagan altars ? 

Now, let us see the divine truth and wisdom with 
which the apostle settled the disputes. One thing 
which he enjoins (at the end of Rom. 14) is, that 
whether any man's light is wholly correct or not, 
he must act conscientiously. He must not do the 
thing which honestly seemed to him wrong, for if 
he did there was sin — the sin of outraging his own 
conscience, even though his scruple turned out to 
be a mistake. Then, first of all, let everybody act 
conscientiously. He tells them, secondly (Rom. 14 : 
3, 4), not to be censorious, but to respect each other's 
conscientious convictions, even when they seemed 
groundless. For there is no positive sin in itself in 
letting alone bacon, for instance, or stopping work 
on Saturday ; and if a brother's mind is under error 
as to the duty of doing so, he deserves our respect 
at least for conscientiously denying himself in these 
things. But, third: When the apostle saw some 
professed Christians teaching that a man should 
make self-righteous merit by continuing to bur- 



54 THE CHRISTIAN SABBATH 

den himself with the Jewish new rnoons, sabbaths, 
fasts, annual passover feasts and sabbatical years 
after the obligation of them was in fact repealed, 
he confessed that this alarmed him (Gal. 4 : 11), 
and made him feel as though all his trouble in 
preaching salvation by free grace to them was to 
go for nothing. For this idea of making merit by 
observing self-imposed ceremonies and troublesome 
rites was entirely a different matter from those other 
conscientious mistakes, and it involved the very poi- 
son of will-worship and self-righteousness. Hence 
(Col. 2 : 16 to end), he expressly and solemnly con- 
demns it all. This never had been the gospel either 
under the Old Testament or the New. To appoint 
the means of grace for his people — this was God's 
part. As long as any ordinance w^as commanded 
by him, our part was to make use of it, humbly 
and faithfully, as a means of grace, in order to 
strengthen the faith and repentance which bring us 
to the Saviour. But the moment any man under- 
took to build up his self-righteousness on will-wor- 
ship he was under a soul-destroying error which 
must not be tolerated one moment. Hence the 
apostle commands that these Jewish holy days, 
feasts and fasts are not to be enforced on anybody ; 
and he explains that they were no longer binding, 
because that new dispensation of which they were 
shadows or types had now come, with its own di- 
vinely-appointed ordinances, and taken the place 
of others. He did not design to be understood as 



THE CHRISTIAN SABBATH 55 

speaking at all of the Lord's day, which is one of 
these New-Testament ordinances. He means only 
the Jewish holy days. Does not the consistency of 
this view with itself and the Scriptures show that 
it is the true one? 

But some one may rejoin that he was speaking of 
the Lord's day also, because he says (Col. 2 : 16), 
"Let no man, therefore, judge you in respect of a 
holy day, or of the new moon, or of the Sabbath 
days" This objector is under a delusion. The 
word " Sabbath " is never applied by a New-Testa- 
ment writer or by one of the writers of the primi- 
tive Church to the Lord's day or Christian Sabbath 
— never once. This all learned critics admit. All 
those early writers carefully reserve the word " Sab- 
bath " (which is a Hebrew word) to denote the holy 
days of the Old Testament ; and when they would 
speak of the holy day of the New Testament they 
call it " first day of the week" or " Lord's day" or 
" Sunday." The Westminster Assembly did indeed 
say of the Lord's day, " which is the Christian Sab- 
bath." This was intended to teach an important 
truth which had been denied by the objectors, that 
the Lord's day is to us by divine appointment what 
the Sabbath was to the Jew T s as to its main sub- 
stance. 

The word "sabbath" was of wide significance 
among the Jews. It meant not only the hallowed 
seventh day, but also the "week" or space of 
seven days. The Pharisee says : " I fast twice in 



56 THE CHRISTIAN SABBATH 

the week/' (Luke 18 : 12). In the Greek it is 
"twice in the Sabbath." The word was also a 
common name for all the Jewish festivals, includ- 
ing even the whole sabbatical year, with new moons, 
passovers and such-like holy days. "I gave them 
my Sabbaths [my religious festivals] to be a sign 
between them and me" (Ezek. 20:12). "The 
land shall enjoy her Sabbaths" (Lev. 23 : 24; 26 : 
34 ; compare 2 Chron. 36 : 21). Hence, the apos- 
tle's mention of "Sabbath days" does not certainly 
prove that he alluded to the seventh day partic- 
ularly; he may have used the word as a com- 
mon name for Jewish holy days. Be this as it 
may, we know that he did not intend the Lord's 
day, because the early writers never apply that 
name to it. 

This Christian holy day is not in question, then, 
in these texts, for about the observance of this we 
believe there was no dispute or diversity in the 
churches. To the sanctification of that Jewish and 
Gentile Christians alike consented. When Paul 
teaches that the observing or not observing of a 
day is, like the matter of meats, non-essential, the 
natural and fair construction is that he means those 
days which were in debate, and no others. When 
he implies that some innocently " regarded every 
day alike," we should understand every one of 
those days about which there was no diversity, not 
the Christian's Lord's day, about which there was 
no dispute. The passage in Colossians is upon the 



THE CHRISTIAN SABBATH. 57 

same subject with those in Romans and Galatians. 
Hence it is fair to regard the one as an explanation 
of the others. Thus, the use of the phrase " Sabbath 
days" in the first is an advantage to our cause, for it 
explains the " every day alike" of Romans as really 
meaning " every sabbatical day ; " that is to say, every 
Jewish holy day, such being the precise meaning of 
"Sabbath" in Paul's mouth. 

One more objection to our view remains, which we 
wish to meet fairly. It is this : Grant that by the 
phrase " Sabbath days" in Colossians the apostle did 
not mean to include the Lord's day. He says of all 
the Jewish sahbata, including the seventh days, 
"which are a shadow of things to come, but the 
body is of Christ." It thus appears that the Sabbath 
day of the fourth commandment was a type, the sub- 
stance of which was to be found in Christ, even as 
the passover was a type of him. Why, then, should 
not the Sabbath pass away with the passover and 
the other types ? There is no positive New-Testa- 
ment law re-enacting it. Thus our opponents. 

The answer is : The Jewish Sabbath was a sign, 
and also something else. Its witnessing use has 
passed away for Jews, so far as it was to them a 
sign of their exodus, their peculiar theocratic cov- 
enant and their title to the land of Canaan. But 
its other uses, as a means of grace and sign of 
heaven, remain for them and for all. Moreover, 
the Christian Sabbath, which is the Lord's day, re- 
mains just as much a "sign" of our Christian sep- 



58 THE CHRISTIAN SABBATH 

aration from the world and engagement to be the 
Lord's as the seventh day ever was to the Jew. 
And our faithfulness in sanctifying the Lord's day 
ought to be as plain a mark distinguishing us from 
unbelievers as that which distinguished the Hebrews 
from the Amorites. That it always was more than 
a mark we proved in the first division of this dis- 
cussion. It is as old as the race ; it was given to 
all the race. The ground of the institution is as 
universal as the race, the completion of creation. 
It is dictated by a universal necessity of man's na- 
ture, which has not at all changed in passing from 
one dispensation to another. It was in full force 
before the typical ceremonies of Moses. It was en- 
joined on Gentiles, who had no business with those 
ceremonies. It had its permanent, moral and spir- 
itual use before Moses came. God then placed an 
additional sacrifice on it for a particular purpose. 
When the typical dispensation passed away, then 
this temporary use of the Sabbath fell off, and the 
original institution remains. God's day is now to 
us just what it was to Adam, Abel, Enoch, Noah, 
Abraham. How reasonable this is may be shown 
from the very comparison which the objector makes, 
that of the passover. The passover was a type, but 
it was something else — a commemoration of redemp- 
tion. It foreshadowed "the Lamb of God which 
taketh away the sin of the world," but it commem- 
orated the redemption of the people from death in 
Egypt. Now, let us see what happened. The Lamb 



THE CHRISTIAN SABBATH 59 

of God came, and was actually sacrificed on Calvary, 
" by one offering taking away sin." Was the pass- 
over revoked f Not at all. Its typical part was re- 
voked ; the lamb was no more ki41ed and roasted. 
But its commemorative part remains to this day. 
The bread and wine are still consecrated by divine 
appointment for a sacrament, and the Lord's Supper 
remains as the Christian's passover. This is j ust what 
the apostle teaches in 1 Cor. 5 : 7, 8. 

When Israel came to Sinai, God did select this 
Sabbath day, which had existed before as a com- 
memoration of creation and a moral and spiritual 
ordinance for all people, to serve the additional pur- 
pose of a " sign " between him and Israel. It was 
a pledge and emblem of their covenant as his pecu- 
liar people (Deut. 5 : 13; Ex. 31 : 13; Ezek. 20 : 12). 
It was for a time possibly an emblem of their peace- 
ful home in Canaan (Heb. 4 : 4-11). It is for us, as 
for them, an emblem of our gracious rest in heaven 
(Heb. 4 : 9). Thus, the observance of the Sabbath 
was, like that of the new moon, marked by two ad- 
ditional sacrifices. These temporary uses passed 
away, of course, with the coming of the new dis- 
pensation. But the moral and perpetual uses of 
the ordinance having been already transferred by 
Christ to the Lord's day, the seventh day remained 
at the time of Paul's writing as mere a shadow to 
the New-Testament saint as a new moon. In this 
aspect the apostle might well argue that the stick- 
ling for it betrayed judaizing. Moreover, when the 



60 THE CHRISTIAN SABBATH 

apostle says (Col. 2 : 17) that the new moons and 
Sabbath days are a " shadow of things to come," 
his real meaning is, the sacrifices celebrated on those 
days were the sl^dow. Literally, the days them- 
selves were not shadows, but only the typical ser- 
vices appointed on them. 

III. We shall now, in the third place, attempt 
to show the ground on which the Sabbath " from 
the resurrection of Christ was changed into the first 
day of the week, which in Scripture is called the 
Lord's day, and is to be continued to the end of 
the world as the Christian Sabbath." This proof 
is chiefly historical, and divides itself into two 
branches, the inspired and the uninspired. The first 
proceeds upon two plain principles. One is, that 
example may be as valid and instructive a guide to 
duty as precept. Or, to state it in another form, the 
precedent set by Christ and his apostles may be as 
binding as their command. The other is, that 
whatever necessarily follows from Scripture "by 
good and necessary consequence" is as really au- 
thorized by it as "what is expressly set down." 

Our first argument shows that every probability 
is in favor of the Sunday's being now God's day, in 
advance of particular testimony. We prove under 
the first main head that a Sabbath institution is uni- 
versal and perpetual — that the command to keep it 
holy belongs to that law from which one jot or one 
tittle cannot pass till heaven and earth pass. But the 



THE CHRISTIAN SABBATH. 61 

apostle Paul (in Col. 2 : 16, 17) clearly tells us that the 
seventh day is no longer the Sabbath. It has been 
changed. To what other day has it been changed ? 
The law is not totally repealed ; it cannot be. What 
day has taken the place of the seventh ? None is 
so likely to be the substitute as the Lord's day; 
this must be the day. 

The main direct argument is found in the fact 
that Christ and his apostles did, from the very 
day of the resurrection, hallow the first day of the 
week as a religious day. To see the full force of 
this fact we must view it in the light of the first 
argument. We remember that the disciples, like 
all men of all ages, are bound by the Decalogue to 
keep holy God's Sabbath. We see them remit the 
observance of the seventh day as no longer binding, 
and we see them observing the first, Must we not 
conclude that these inspired men regarded the au- 
thority of God as now attaching to this Lord's 
day? 

We shall find, then, that the disciples commenced 
the observance of the first day on the very day of 
Christ's resurrection, and thenceforward continued 
it. John 20 : 19 tells us that the "same day, 
being the first day of the week," the disciples 
were assembled at evening with closed doors, and 
Christ came and stood in the midst. Can we 
doubt that they met for worship? In the twen- 
ty-sixth verse we learn, "And after eight days 
again the disciples were within, and Thomas with 



62 THE CHRISTIAN SABBATH 

them" (who had been absent before). " Then came 
Jesus, the doors being shut, and stood in the midst, 
and said, Peace be unto you." None will doubt 
that this was also a meeting for worship, and the 
language implies that it was their second meeting. 
Now, it is admitted by all that the Jews, in count- 
ing time, always included in their count the days 
with which the period began and ended. The best- 
known instance of this rule is seen in the rising of 
Christ. He was to be "three days in the heart of 
the earth," but the three days were made out only 
by counting the day of his death and the day of his 
rising, although the latter event happened early in 
the morning of that day. By this mode of count- 
ing the eighth day, or full week from the disciples' 
first meeting, brings us again to the first day t)f the 
w r eek. Thus we learn that twice at least between 
the resurrection and Pentecost the first day was 
kept as the Lord's day. 

But the decisive instance is that of Pentecost 
itself. The reader will see, by consulting Lev. 
23 : 15, 16 or Deut. 15:9, that this day was fixed 
in the following manner: On the morrow after that 
Sabbath (seventh day) which was included within 
the passover week a sheaf of the earliest ripe corn 
was cut, brought fresh into the sanctuary and pre- 
sented as a thank-offering unto God. Thus, the 
day of this ceremony must always be the first day 
of the week, corresponding to our Lord's day. From 
this day they were to count seven weeks complete, 



THE CHRISTIAN SABBATH 63 

and the fiftieth day was to be Pentecost day, or the 
beginning of their "feast of ingathering." Re- 
membering, now, that the Israelites always in- 
cluded in their reckoning the day from which and 
the day to which they counted, we see that the fif- 
tieth day brings us again to the first day of the 
week. We are told expressly that Christ rose on 
the first day of the week. 

We thus learn the important fact that the day 
selected by God for setting up the gospel dispensa- 
tion and for the great pentecostal outpouring was 
the Lord's day — a significant and splendid testi- 
mony to the sacred honor it was intended to have 
in the Christian ages. 

This epoch was indeed the creation of a new world 
in the spiritual sense. The work was equal in glory 
and everlasting moment to that first creation which 
caused " the morning stars to sing together and all 
the sons of God to shout for joy." Well might God 
substitute the first day for the seventh when the first 
day had now become the sign of two separate events, 
the rising of Christ and the founding of the new 
dispensation, either of which is as momentous and 
blessed to us as the w r orld's foundation. 

But we read in Acts 1 : 14 and 2 : 1 that this 
seventh Lord's day was also employed by the apos- 
tles and disciples as a day for religious worship; 
and it was while they were thus engaged that they 
received the divine sanction in their blessed baptism 
of fire and of the Holy Ghost. Then the first pub- 



64 THE CHRISTIAN SABBATH 

lie proclamation of the gospel under the new dis- 
pensation began, and the model was set up for the 
consecration of the new Christian Sabbath (not by 
the burning of additional lambs) by public preach- 
ing, the two sacraments of baptism and the Supper 
and the oblation of their worldly substance to God. 
At this all-important stage every step, every act, of 
the divine providence recorded by inspiration in the 
Acts was formative and fundamental. Hence we 
must believe that this event was meant by God as 
a forcible precedent, establishing the Lord's day as 
our Christian Sabbath. 

Let the reader carefully weigh this question : 
Have we any other kind of warrant for the frame- 
work of the Church ? All Christians, for instance, 
believe that the deacon's office in the Church is of 
perpetual divine appointment. Even Rome has it, 
though perverted. What is the basis of that belief? 
The precedent set in the sixth chapter of Acts. The 
apostles there say, It is not good " for us to leave 
the word of God and serve tables," etc. They do 
not say even as much about the universal perpetuity 
of this office as Paul says to Titus (ch. 1 : 5) about 
the elder's office: " Ordain elders in every city." 
But all sensible men see that the principle stated 
and the example set are enough, and that the Holy 
Spirit obviously taught the inspired historians to re- 
late this formative act of the new dispensation as a 
model for all churches. The warrant for making 
the Lord's day the Sabbath is of the same kind. 



THE CHRISTIAN SABBATH 65 

It is most evident, from the New-Testament his- 
tory, that the apostles and the churches they planted 
uniformly hallowed the Lord's day. The instances 
are not numerous, but they are distinct. 

The next clear instance is in Acts 20 : 7. The 
apostle Paul was now returning from his famous 
mission to Macedonia and Achaia in full prospect 
of captivity at Jerusalem. He stops at the favorite 
little church of Troas, on the Asiatic coast, a little 
south of the Hellespont, to spend a week with his 
converts there: a And upon the first day of the 
week, when the disciples came together to break 
bread, Paul preached unto them (ready to depart 
on the morrow), and continued his speech until 
midnight." Here we have a double evidence of 
our point. First, Paul preached to the disciples on 
this day, while he had been, as the sixth verse shows, 
a whole week at Troas, including the Jewish Sab- 
bath. Why did he wait a whole week ? Why did 
not the meeting, with the sermon and sacrament, 
take place on the Jewish Sabbath? We learn 
from verse sixteen that Paul had very little time 
to spare, because he had to make the whole jour- 
ney from Philippi to Jerusalem, with all his way- 
side visits, within the six weeks between the end 
of the paschal and beginning of the pentecostal 
feast. He was obviously waiting for the Church's 
sacred day in order to join them in their public wor- 
ship, just as a missionary would wait now under 
similar circumstances. But 5 second. The words 



66 THE CHRISTIAN SABBATH. 

"When the disciples came together to break bread " 
show that, the first day of the week was the one on 
which they met to celebrate the Lord's Supper, So 
it appears that this church at Troas, planted and 
trained by Paul, kept the first day of the week for 
public worship and the sacrament, and the inspired 
man puts himself to some inconvenience to comply 
with their usage. It has indeed been objected that 
he selected this day not because it was the Lord's 
day, but because he could not wait any longer. 
This is exploded by the fact that he had already 
waited six days, including the Jewish Sabbath ; he 
was evidently waiting for this day because it was 
the Lord's day. 

The next clear instance is in 1 Cor. 16 : 1, 2 : "Now, 
concerning the collection for the saints, as I have 
given order to the churches of Galatia, even so do ye. 
Upon the first day of the week let every one of you 
lay by him in store, as God hath prospered him, that 
there be no gatherings when I come." We here learn 
two things : that the weekly oblation of almsgiving 
was fixed for the Lord's day, and that this rule was 
enacted not only for the church of Corinth, but for 
all the churches of Galatia. It seems a very clear 
inference that the apostle afterward made the rule 
uniform in other churches as he organized them. 
Again, we find the objectors arguing that, admit- 
ting what we claim, we have not proved that there 
was any regular public worship on the Lord's day, 
because it is said, "Lay by you in store;" that is, 



THE CHRISTIAN SABBATH 67 

at home. But the answers are two: The words, 
"Lay by him," etc., are, literally, "place to him- 
self" or " segregate" — " treasuring according as the 
Lord hath prospered him." It is a misunderstand- 
ing of the apostle's meaning to take the word "treas- 
uring" as putting a piece of money on Sunday morn- 
ing in a separate box or purse at home. Most fre- 
quently, as we know from history, it was not money, 
but bread, meat, fruit, clothing, a part of anything 
with which Providence had blessed them ; and the 
undoubted usage in the earliest age after the apostles 
was to carry this oblation with them to church every 
Lord's day morning and give it to the deacons, who 
put it into a common stock for charitable uses. The 
words " treasuring it" refer, says Calvin, to a wholly 
different idea— to that which our Saviour expresses 
(Matt. 6 : 20) : " Lay up for yourselves treasures in 
heaven;" to that idea which the charitable Chris- 
tian expressed on his tombstone : " What I kept, I 
lost ; what I gave away, I have." It is the Lord's 
treasury which the apostle here has in view — the 
Lord's "store." So that the natural meaning of 
the precept is fairly presented in this paraphrase : 
"Let every one every Sunday morning set apart, 
according as the Lord hath prospered him, what he 
intends to carry to church with him to put into the 
Lord's store." But, second. Even if we contradict 
the unanimous voice of history, testifying that the 
weekly oblation took place at the church-meeting 
and went at once into the deacon's hands, the truth 



68 THE CHRISTIAN SABBATH. 

remains that this oblation was an act of worship. 
(See Phil. 4 : 18 ; 2 Cor. 9 : 12, 13.) This weekly 
oblation was, then, a weekly act of worship, and it 
was appointed by inspired authority to be done on 
the Lord's day. That makes this day a sacred day 
of worship ; we care not whether this oblation was 
public or private, so far as this argument is con- 
cerned.* 

* The next place to be cited is Heb. 4 : 9. This verse (with 
its context, which must be carefully read) teaches that, as there 
remains to believers under the Christian dispensation a hope 
of an eternal rest, so there remains to us an earthly Sabbath to 
foreshadow it. The points to be noticed in the explanation of 
the chapter are : That God has an eternal spiritual rest ; that 
he invited Old-Testament believers to share it ; that it is some- 
thing higher than Israel's home in Canaan, because after Joshua 
had fully installed Israel in that rest, God's rest is still held up 
as something future. The seventh day (verse 4) was the memo- 
rial of God's rest, and was thus connected with it. It was under 
the old dispensation, as under the new, a spiritual faith which 
introduced into God's rest, and it was unbelief which excluded 
from it. But as God's rest was something higher than a home 
in Canaan, and was still offered in the ninety-fifth Psalm long 
after Joshua settled Israel in that rest, it follows (verse 9) that 
there still remains a sabbatism, or Sabbath-keeping, for God's 
people under the new dispensation ; and hence (verse 11) we 
ought to seek to enter into that spiritual rest of God, which is 
by faith. Now, let it be noted that the word for God's "rest" 
throughout the passage is a different one from " Sabbath." But 
the apostle's inference is that because God still offers us his 
"rest" under the new dispensation, there remaineth to us a Sab- 
bath-keeping under this dispensation. What does this mean? Is 
the sabbatism identically our "rest" in faith? But the seventh 
day was not identically that rest; it was the memorial and 
emblem of it. So now sabbatism is the memorial and em- 



THE CHRISTIAN SABBATH 69 

The other instance of apostolic consecration of 
the first day is perhaps the most instructive of all. 
In Rev. 1 : 10, John, when about to describe how 
he came to have this revelation, says, "I was in 
, the spirit on the Lord's day." The venerable apos- 
tle was " in the isle that is called Patmos for the 
word of God and for the testimony of Jesus." We 
know from history exactly what this means. The 
pagan magistrates had banished him to this rocky, 
desolate islet in the -ZEgsean Sea as a punishment 
for preaching the gospel and testifying that Jesus 
is our risen Saviour. He was there alone, separated 
from all his brethren. But he " was in the Spirit- 
on the Lord's day." What does this mean? It 
means that he was doing what godly people now 
call " keeping Sunday." He was engaging in spir- 
itual exercises. He was holding communion with 
the Holy Spirit. Here, then, is our first point: 
that although in solitude, cut off alike from Chris- 
tian meetings and ordinary week-day occupations 
by his banishment, the inspired apostle was " keep- 
ing Sunday." It is the strongest possible example. 
Our second point is, that God blessed him in his 
Sabbath-keeping with the greatest spiritual blessing 
which perhaps he had enjoyed since he sat at the 
feet of Jesus. His Saviour came down from glory to 
" keep Sunday " with him. Our third and strongest 

blem of the rest. Because the rest is ours, therefore the Sab- 
bath-keeping is still ours ; heaven and its earthly type belong 
equally to both dispensations. 



70 THE CHRISTIAN SABBATH 

point is, that the inspired man here calls the day 
" the Lord's day." There is no doubt but that the 
"Lord" named is the glorified Redeemer, whom he 
declares in his epistle to be " the true God and eternal 
life." There is but one consistent and scriptural sense 
to place on this name of the day. It is the day that 
belongs especially to the Lord. But as all our 
days belong in one sense to him, the only meaning 
is that the first day of the week is now set apart 
and hallowed to Christ. In Isa. 58 : 13 the Sab- 
bath is called by God " my holy day ; " in 56 : 4, 
" my Sabbath." That was God's day ; it belonged 
# to God. This is Christ's day, and in the same sense 
belongs to Christ. It is consecrated to his worship 
as was the Sabbath; it is virtually "the Christian 
Sabbath." 

We now add the uninspired testimony of the 
early historians and Fathers, showing that from the 
apostles' days Christians understood this matter as 
we do, and consecrated the first day of the week. 

But let us explain in what sense we use this hu- 
man testimony. In our view, all the uninspired 
church testimony in the world, however venerable, 
would never make it our religious duty to keep 
Sunday as a Sabbath without God's own command- 
ment. We use these "Fathers" simply as histor- 
ical witnesses. Their evidence derives its sole value 
from its relevancy to this point, whether the apostles, 
who were inspired, left the command and precedent in 
the churches of observing the Lord's day as the Sah- 



THE CHRISTIAN SABBATH 71 

bath of the fourth commandment. If they said, " We 
Fathers command you to observe Sunday," we should 
reject the authority as nothing worth. But when, 
as honest and well-informed witnesses, they testify 
that the apostles taught the churches to observe 
Sunday, we regard their testimony as of some 
value. 

Our first witness, then, fe a learned pagan, Pliny 
the Younger, a high magistrate under the emperor 
Trajan. He says, in a letter written a little after 
the death of the apostle John, that the Christians 
were accustomed to meet for worship on " a stated 
day." This was the Lord's day, as we see from 
other witnesses. 

Ignatius, the celebrated martyr-bishop of Anti- 
och, says, in his Epistle to the Magnesians, written 
not more than twenty years after the death of John, 
that " this is the Lord's day, the day consecrated to 
the resurrection, the chief and queen of all the 
days." 

Justin Martyr, who died about A. d. 160, says 
that the Christians " neither celebrated the Jewish 
festivals, nor observed their Sabbaths, nor practiced 
circumcision " [Dialogue with Trypho). In another 
place he says that they were " all accustomed to 
meet on the day which is denominated Sunday, for 
reading the Scriptures, prayer, exhortation and com- 
munion. The assemblies met on Sunday, because 
this is the first day on which God, having changed 
the darkness and the elements, created the world, 



72 THE CHRISTIAN SABBATH 

and because Jesus our Lord on this day rose from 
the dead/' etc. 

Tertullian, at the close of the second century, 
says : We Christians u celebrate Sunday as a joyful 
day. On the Lord's day we think it wrong to fast 
or to kneel in prayer." It was a common opinion 
of the early Christians that all public prayers on 
the Lord's day should be uttered standing, because 
kneeling is a more sorrowful attitude and inconsist- 
ent with the joy and blessedness of Christ's day. 

Clement of Alexandria, a very learned Christian 
contemporary with Tertullian, says : "A true Chris- 
tian, according to the commands of the gospel, ob- 
serves the Lord's day by casting out all bad thoughts 
and cherishing all goodness, honoring the resurrec- 
tion of the Lord, which took place on that day." 

Perhaps the most valuable, because the most im- 
portant and explicit, as well as the most learned, 
witness, is Eusebius of Csesarea, who was in his 
prime about A. D. 325. In a commentary on the 
ninety-second Psalm, which, the reader will remem- 
ber, is entitled, "A psalm or song for the Sabbath 
day," he says: "The Word" (Christ) "by the 
new covenant translated and transferred the feast 
of the Sabbath to the morning light, and gave us 
the symbol of the true rest, the saving Lord's 
day, the first of light, in which the Saviour gain- 
ed the victory over death. On this day, which is 
the first of the Light and the true Sun, we assem- 
ble after the interval of six days, and celebrate 



THE CHRISTIAN SABBATH 73 

holy and spiritual Sabbath ; even all nations re- 
deemed by him throughout the world assemble, 
and do those things according to the spiritual law 
which were decreed for the priests to do on the Sab- 
bath. All things which it was duty to do on the 
Sabbath, these we have transferred to the Lord's 
day, as more appropriately belonging unto it, be- 
cause it has the precedence, and is first in rank, and 
more honorable than the Jewish Sabbath. It hath 
been enjoined on us that we should meet together 
on this day ; and it is evidence that we should do 
these things announced in this psalm." 

These citations from the pastors of the early 
Church might be continued to great length. Not 
only individuals, but church councils, added their 
sanctions to the sacred observance of the Lord's 
day. Thus, the Council of Laodicea (a.d. 363) 
commanded Christians to rest on the Lord's day 
from all secular labors except those imposed by 
necessity. Many other councils during the fourth 
century ordain that public worship and the sacra- 
ments shall be observed on the same day. It may 
be asked, If this sanctification of the Lord's day 
w T as of divine appointment through the apostles, why 
do we not hear of earlier councils enacting its observ- 
ance nearer the days of the apostles ? The answer is 
very simple: During the ages of persecution, which 
only ceased with the accession of Constantine, coun- 
cils could meet rarely and with great peril, and the 
persecutors busily destroyed their records. 



74 THE CHRISTIAN SABBATH. 

Those who are familiar with the controversy 
about the Lord's day are aware that quite a num- 
ber of writers, especially those of prelatical views, 
are in the habit of roundly asserting that the 
" Fathers " held the fourth commandment to be 
abrogated; that they grounded their observance 
of the Lord's day not on God's authority, but on 
comity, convenience and church authority, like the 
other feasts ; and that no " Father " bases the ob- 
servance of the Lord's day on the fourth com- 
mandment expressly. They are very fond of quot- 
ing the great Augustine, for instance, as teaching 
that the fourth commandment alone among the 
ten was "partly figurative," and so abolished with 
the other types. The arrogancy and dogmatism 
with which these assertions are made by prelatie 
adversaries of God's law are offensive to every fair 
and reverent mind. Those who are best acquaint- 
ed with these Fathers will be least disposed to 
attach importance to their assertions, whether con- 
current with or against God's truth. Had these 
prelatists, for instance, the honesty to quote all that 
their favorite Augustine says in that same exposi- 
tion of the Decalogue, the sensible reader would 
feel the contempt for his opinions on this subject 
which they deserve. We should see this great 
Father expounding each of the ten commandments 
as typified in the " ten plagues of the Egyptians," 
and gravely running a fanciful analogy between a 
given precept and a given plague! The fact is, 



THE CHRISTIAN SABBATH. 75 

that even the more learned Fathers (Augustine had 
little Greek and no Hebrew learning) were prevent- 
ed by certain valid causes from taking a point of 
view whence they could properly appreciate the 
relations of the old dispensation and the new. The 
reasons were these : A good knowledge of Hebrew 
was rare. Judaism was only known to the Chris- 
tians of those ages in its worst phase of Pharisee- 
ism, because all truly-believing Jews, of the type of 
Symeon, Anna, Matthew, etc., had gladly acceded 
to Christianity and been absorbed into the Chris- 
tian Church. Hence it was a natural mistake to 
confound the true Old-Testament religion to a cer- 
tain extent with the apostate Judaism they witness- 
ed around them in these professed advocates of the 
Old Testament, and to misconceive the divinely- 
established worship of the old dispensation accord- 
ing to the spurious forms to which it was now 
perverted after its fulfillment in the new dispen- 
sation. It w 7 as easy for Christians, witnessing the 
typical worship only in these spurious anachron- 
isms, to overlook the fact that there had been a 
time when it had been of divine appointment, 
spiritual and evangelical. Third : The Christians 
knew of Jews only as the murderers of the Lord, 
as stubborn and embittered opponents of his gos- 
pel (whether as revealed in their own Old Testa- 
ment or in the New), as systematic slanderers of 
the Church and as instigators of pagan persecu- 
tions. This odious attitude of all the professed 



76 THE CHRISTIAN SABBATH 

advocates of the Old Testament could not but prej- 
udice the Christians' apprehension of their Script- 
ures. To these causes must be added, in the fourth 
place, the perverse, metaphorical and mystical plan 
of interpreting Scripture, and especially Old-Testa- 
ment Scripture, which the Fathers so soon imbibed, 
and which they saw carried to such extremes by 
the rabbinical scholars. When we consider these 
causes, we cease to wonder that the early Christian 
writers misconceived the proper relations of the Old 
Testament to the New, or that they uttered on this 
subject many ambiguities and errors. 

If, now, a Father is found saying that the apos- 
tles " abolished the Sabbath," he is to be under- 
stood, not as meaning that the apostles abrogated the 
fourth commandment — a statement which can be 
found in no respectable Christian writer — but he is 
thinking only of the rabbinical seventh day, with 
its senseless and unscriptural superstitions. This 
is the simple key to all these patristic citations. 

Some of the prelatic enemies of our Christian 
Sabbath lay much stress on the assertion that none of 
the Fathers expressly trace the Christian observance 
of the Lord's day to the fourth commandment. 
What if they do not? This is, after all, only neg- 
ative testimony, which proves nothing positive. 
We point, on the opposite hand, to the fact that 
none of the Fathers deny the continued authority of 
the fourth commandment in its essential substance. 
We hear the w T isest of them asserting that the 



THE CHRISTIAN SABBATH 77 

sanctification of one seventh part of our time in 
the observance of the first day is of divine author- 
ity through the apostles. We hear Eusebius, the 
most learned of them all, say that Christ, by the 
new covenant, translated and transferred the feast of 
the Sabbath to the first day, or Lord's day, and that 
all the Christians in the world accordingly have trans- 
ferred the Sabbath duties to that day. Is not this 
virtually saying the essential thing — that the sanc- 
tification of the Lord's day is the Christian's com- 
pliance with the fourth commandment? 

A comprehensive view of these testimonies suf- 
ficiently shows what was the opinion and what the 
usage of the early Christians. As the Dark Ages 
approached, sound knowledge of the Hebrew liter- 
ature became very rare ; few could read the Old Tes- 
tament in the original language, and the embittered 
and sinful prejudices of the Christians against the 
Jews had their influence in making the former in- 
different to the Hebrew Scriptures. Hence great 
ignorance of the old dispensation and of its relations 
to the new sprang up. It was natural that the 
grounds of Sabbath observance should then be 
misunderstood. Superstition was then rapidly in- 
creasing, and saints' days and holy days of human 
invention first rivaled and then surpassed God's 
own day in the veneration of the people. When 
the great Reformation came, many of the Reform- 
ers remained under the error which confounded 
the Lord's day with the Church's superstitious holy 



78 THE CHRISTIAN SABBATH. 

days, and when they threw off the trammels of su- 
perstition, unfortunately they cast away the divine 
obligation of the Sabbath with them. 

When we see some of the Protestant churches 
and divines of Europe deliberately defending world- 
ly amusements (after public worship) on- the Lord's 
day, w r e should not do injustice to the piety and con- 
scientiousness which many of them show in other 
things, nor should we condemn errors which they 
justify to themselves by arguments which they sin- 
cerely though erroneously believe, as severely as the 
profane abuse of the Sabbath committed by some 
in our country against their own clear convictions. 
Yet the deplorable fact remains that these unscript- 
ural views about the divine authority of the Sab- 
bath have been the bane of Protestantism. They 
cause and perpetuate much of the irreligion and 
skepticism which deform Protestant Europe in 
many of its parts. It is historically true that the 
vitality and holiness of the Church are usually in 
proportion to its reverence for the Sabbath. The 
Sabbath-keeping churches and generations have 
been the holy and zealous ones. 

This recurring fact may remind us of another ar- 
gument : that the necessity of a Sabbath day is writ- 
ten in man's very nature. The same God who laid 
the foundation for its observance in his unchange- 
able law for all nations and dispensations has also 
laid the foundation for it in the faculties of man's 
body and mind, and even in the nature of the brutes 



THE CHRISTIAN SABBATH 79 

which work for man. This truth has received re- 
markable confirmation in this age, not only from 
Christian teachers, but from physicians, statesmen, 
historians and business-men. Experience has taught 
us that neither man's body nor his soul, nor the beast 
which is his servant, was made by the Creator to work 
seven days in the week. The attempt to do so brings 
upon the body lassitude, nervous excitability, dis- 
ease, premature old age, and often sudden death, 
and on the mind morbid excitement, impatience, 
rashness, blindness of judgment, and not seldom 
lunacy. The very beast of burden can do more 
labor without injury in six days than by working 
all the seven. An army can be carried farther upon 
a long march in six days than in seven. It is well 
known that the merchant who spends his Sabbaths 
in his counting-house or in worldly excitements is 
liable to become a bankrupt, because the privation 
of that recurring sacred calm which God enjoins in 
his word and in Nature leaves his mind and heart 
unhinged. The professional man who devotes his 
Sabbaths to his study ends not seldom in lunacy 
or in suicide. 

Again : As a social and moral institution the 
weekly Sabbath is precious. It is a quiet domes- 
tic reunion for the bustling sons of toil. It brings 
around a period of neatness and decency, when the soil 
of weekly labor is laid aside and men meet each other 
amid the proprieties of the sanctuary and the sacred 
repose of home to renew their social affections. It 



80 THE CHRISTIAN SABBATH. 

enforces a vacation in those earthly and turbulent 
affections which would otherwise become morbid 
and excessive. 

But, above all, the Sabbath is essential for man's 
spiritual welfare. God found it necessary in Para- 
dise for his innocent creatures, necessary for holy 
patriarchs and prophets, and necessary for Chris- 
tians. A creature subject to the law of habit, finite 
in his faculties, compelled by the conditions of his 
existence to divide his cares between earth and 
heaven, cannot accomplish his destiny without an 
authoritative distribution of his time between the 
two worlds. When we remember that men are 
now carnal and by nature ungodly, ever prone to 
avert their eyes from heaven to earth ; when we see 
so much of mundane affection, so much of the eager 
craving and bustle of worldliness, enticing to an in- 
fringement of the claims of heaven, — we see the ab- 
solute necessity of such a division. But, obviously, 
if such a sacred season is necessary, then it must be 
marked off by divine authority, and not by a sort 
of convention on man's part. Do we not see that 
even the divine sanction is insufficient among many 
who profess to admit it ? If the Sabbath be ground- 
ed only in human agreement, the license which men 
will allow themselves in infringing its claims will 
at last effectually abrogate the whole. Such is the 
lamentable result to which a Sunday of man's 
appointment has actually come in more than one 
land, both Protestant and Roman Catholic. The 



THE CHRISTIAN SABBATH 81 

most striking confirmation of the whole argument 
may be seen at this time in a part of Protestant 
Germany, where, after God's Sabbath was repudi- 
ated, the Sunday of man^s device has slipped away 
also, leaving the populace alike without a weekly 
rest and without Christianity. Experience proves 
that to neglect the Sabbath day is virtually to 
neglect religion. 

We have thus found the Sabbath law written by 
the same divine Hand on man's nature and on the 
pages of the Bible. 

The chief attention in this discussion has been 
given to this point : That the duty of keeping holy 
the Lord's day is of perpetual and moral obligation 
on all men. It is by no means to be understood 
that this duty is hard to be seen by the plain Chris- 
tian because many objections have been solved and 
many explanations made by us in reaching this con- 
clusion. It is not any lack of clearness in the duty 
which has made us deem this long discussion useful^ 
but it is the pertinacity with which error has sought 
to obscure God's truth. We have weighed the objec- 
tions patiently, candidly, thoroughly— not because 
they really deserved weighing, but only because a sad 
experience shows their power of deceiving. We 
w r ished to clear away the last shadow of doubt 
from God's command. Yet the fair and obedient 
mind may reach the knowledge of it, if the caviler 
will only leave him unbiased, by a very short and 
simple process. There stands the command, " Ee- 

6 



82 THE CHRISTIAN SABBATH. 

member the Sabbath day, to keep it holy," in the 
Decalogue. That law was never meant for change. 
Then the substance of it must bind me in this last 
dispensation just as it has bound all men from Adam. 
The matter is just as plain as u Thou shalt not kill," 
" Thou shalt have no other gods before me." 

It was worth the time and toil for us to reach this 
settled conviction of a continuing divine obligation 
for the Sabbath. Its proper observance can never 
be secured in any other way. It is a " Thus saith 
the Lord," and this alone, which binds the con- 
science and spurs the heart of every true Christian. 
Let the intimate conviction of this divine warrant 
for the holy day be established in the minds of 
Christian people against all the doubts and quib- 
bles which have infested parts of Christendom since 
the Dark Ages, and all men that really fear God will 
begin to sanctify his day. Hence we close this essay 
with the feeling that if this conviction is established, 
little more remains to be done except to invoke the 
aid of divine grace for assistance in executing our 
convictions of duty. 

The proof which is here presented of the nature 
of the Sabbath is the best answer to the question, 
How ought it to be kept? Let conscience and 
heart respond to God's requirement that his day 
be hallowed by us, and the details will be easily 
arranged. 

But the answer to this question of details given 
in the Westminster Confession is so precise and so 



THE CHRISTIAN SABBATH 83 

scriptural that it will not be amiss to repeat it : We 
must "not only observe an holy rest all the day from 
our own works, words and thoughts about our own 
worldly employments and recreations, but also be 
taken up the whole time in the public and private 
exercises of his worship and in the duties of neces- 
sity and mercy/' 

A day consists of twenty-four hours, and when 
God commands us to sanctify one day to him, as we 
devote the other six to "all our own work," the 
honest conscience will find no difficulty in conclud- 
ing that holy time should not be abridged by unne- 
cessary sleep or by needless recreations any more 
than any other day. Let true faith possess the 
soul with a scriptural sense of the arduous task to 
be finished in the believer's own life in fitting it 
for the everlasting Sabbath, and of the multitudi- 
nous claims of misery and ignorance surrounding 
him among his perishing fellow-men, and the holy 
occupations of the Sabbath day will appear so ur- 
gent and so numerous that there will be no room 
in it for either worldliness or indolence. Let us 
hear the law and the testimony, which we have 
shown to be unrepealed : 

Deut. 5 : 12-14: "Keep the sabbath day to sanc- 
tify it, as the Lord thy God hath commanded thee. 
Six days thou shalt labor and do all thy work : but 
the seventh day is the sabbath of the Lord thy God ; 
in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, 
nor thy daughter, nor thy man-servant, nor thy 



84 THE CHRISTIAN SABBATH. 

maid-servant, nor thine ox, nor thine ass, nor any of 
thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates." 

Ex. 34 : 21 : " Six days thou shalt work, but on 
the seventh day thou shalt rest : in earing-time and 
in harvest thou shalt rest." 

Ps. 42 : 4: "I had gone with the multitude; I 
went with them to the house of God, with the voice 
of joy and praise, with a multitude that kept holy 
day." 

Neh. 13 : 15 : "In those days saw I in Judah 
some treading wine-presses on the sabbath, and 
bringing in sheaves, and lading asses ; as also wine, 
grapes, and figs, and all manner of burdens, which 
they brought into Jerusalem on the sabbath day ; 
and I testified against them in the day w r herein they 
sold victuals." 

Mark 2 : 27 : " The sabbath was made for man, 
and not man for the sabbath." 

Matt. 24 : 20 : " But pray ye that your flight be 
not ... on the sabbath day." 

Luke 13 : 15, 16 (to show that "works of neces- 
sity and mercy," however forbidden by rabbinical 
superstition, were always consistent with the fourth 
commandment under both dispensations) : " Thou 
hypocrite, doth not each one of you on the sab- 
bath loose his ox or his ass from the stall, and lead 
him away to watering? And ought not this woman, 
being a daughter of Abraham, whom Satan hath 
bound, lo, these eighteen years, be loosed from this 
bond on the sabbath day ?" 



THE CHRISTIAN SABBATH. 85 

Rev. 1 : 10 : "I was in the Spirit on the Lord's 
day." 

Isa. 58 : 13, 14 : " If thou turn away thy foot 
from the sabbath, from doing thy pleasure on my 
holy day ; and call the sabbath a delight, the holy 
of the Lord, honorable ; and shalt honor him, not 
doing thine own ways, nor finding thine own pleas- 
ure, nor speaking thine own words : then shalt thou 
delight thyself in the Lord ; and I will cause thee to 
ride upon the high places of the earth, and feed thee 
with the heritage of Jacob thy father: for the mouth 
of the Lord hath spoken it." 

IV. The increasing disregard of the Lord's day 
in the United States demands a renewed application 
of the authority of the civil law to support right 
customs. The American commonwealths usually 
have Sabbath laws. These do not, indeed, compel 
the citizens, under any civil pains or penalties, to 
attend the churches or the sacraments; nor do 
these laws attempt to prescribe a spiritual use of 
the day. The latter is the function of the Church 
alone. But the State closes all her own halls of leg- 
islation and justice, and gives an entire rest to her 
own servants, on the Christian Sabbath. She also 
enjoins upon all citizens a cessation of all forms 
of secular employments on that day, except such 
as are unavoidable, so* as to secure for all a week- 
ly rest and the opportunity to keep religion's holy 
day to God if they desire it. In how many 



86 THE CHRISTIAN SABBATH 

ways even this slender respect of civil society to 
God's day is now impaired the reader knows but 
too well. Especially is the law of rest trodden 
upon by those great carrying corporations which 
seem to feel themselves already too great for the law. 
To add to this disorder, large numbers of our cit- 
izens, composed of a few professed atheists and infidels 
and a multitude of immigrants from states abroad, 
where the Sabbath has been long dishonored, now 
formally attack the right of the State to enact any 
Sabbath rest or to enforce it by civil pains. Their 
argument is plausible. It proceeds from the thor- 
ough separation and independence of Church and 
State established by the American constitutions. 
These documents say that men of all religions and 
of no religion shall be equal before the law ; that 
all shall enjoy liberty of thought; that no man 
shall lose any privilege which the other citizens 
possess by reason of his opinions or usages about 
religion; that it shall be unlawful for the State 
to make any religious establishment of any relig- 
ion. From this position the enemies of the Sab- 
bath proceed thus : " The Christian Sabbath is no 
more than an ecclesiastical and religious institution. 
The Jewish Sabbath, in its day, was only a tempo- 
rary and typical one. The churches may require 
an observance of a Sabbath from such persons as 
choose to join them. But the State has no more 
right to pass any law about its observance than 
about enforcing attendance on any other Christian 



THE CHRISTIAN SABBATH 87 

rite or sacrament. . Hence, when a citizen who does 
not believe in religion or its holy days is estopped 
from his lawful labor or pleasure on such days, it 
is an infringement of his guaranteed freedom of 
opinion. The loss of the day's profit is of the na- 
ture of a fine levied against him for his opinions, 
and is therefore unconstitutional." 

Several replies to this argument are commonly 
heard from the pious. One reply has been, that, 
according to the American laws, the majority are 
entitled to rule ; and, since the major part of Amer- 
icans are Protestant Christians, they are entitled to 
enforce Sabbath laws. But this argument is ruined 
by two rejoinders, One' is, that, while the major- 
ity has a right to rule, it is only in accordance with, 
and within the limits of, the Constitution. The 
other is, that should the majority in America ever 
become infidel, then, by the same argument, they 
would have as good a right to pass laws prohibit- 
ing a Sabbath. 

Again, it is argued that our Sabbath laws lay no 
other restriction on the infidel than on the Chris- 
tian, and that therefore they are just and equal. 
The Christian citizens do not require of the non- 
Christian any other Sabbath observance than what 
they exact of themselves, so that there is no un- 
fairness. That this is also invalid may be shown 
thus : Let us suppose Papists in the majority here, 
and forbidding Protestants to labor on their numerous 
saints 5 days, whose observance we regard as wholly 



88 THE CHRISTIAN SABBATH. 

superstitious. They could say that their requirement 
was fair, because they observed it themselves. But 
we should regard it as oppressive, because we should 
find ourselves prohibited by others' superstitions 
from acts to which we had a moral right. Just so 
argue the infidel immigrants against our Sabbath 
laws. 

Again, we hear the argument put thus : Although 
Church and State are separate here, yet the Amer- 
ican is a Christian people. The country was settled 
by Christians. The great mass are professed Chris- 
tians. Hence, the immigrant who finds himself a 
dissentient must submit to this Christian feature of 
the society whose hospitality he enjoys. If he does 
not like this usage of ours, he is free to go away. 
But, unfortunately, the State, which enforces these 
Sunday laws and which invites these dissentients to 
become citizens among us, has made an express con- 
stitutional covenant with them that they shall in- 
cur, at the hands of the State, no restriction or 
limit of privilege whatever on any religious ground. 
Now, if any man has a natural, secular right to 
live without a Sabbath, this objection is formidable. 

Once more : it is urged that Christians, conscien- 
tiously believing it their own duty to observe the 
Sabbath, have a civic right, on the lowest grounds, 
to observe the day, and to be protected from mo- 
lestation by the amusements and employments of 
those who care nothing for it. The infidel replies 
that it is as much the Christian's business to take 



THE CHRISTIAN SABBATH. 89 

his psalm-singing out of the way of the worldling's 
Sunday theatre or brass band. He says that in a 
non-Christian State, such as the American, the one 
stands on as lawful a footing as the other. 

But a more tenable plea for the Sabbath laws of 
the State is found in the facts noticed above, that 
man's natural constitution requires a weekly rest. 
Hence, even regarding the State as non- Christian, 
and as possessed of no functions except protecting 
temporal and earthly interests, we may claim for 
it a right to legislate a rest for man and beast on 
grounds of health and temporal welfare. This is a 
sound argument, but it only rests our Sabbath laws 
on a hygienic ground. It is as when a State enacts 
that children and minor servants shall not be kept 
at work in shops and factories more than a healthy 
number of hours. 

But the real ground of the State Sabbath laws 
was touched when we raised the question on the 
previous page : Whether any reasonable creature, 
a subject of civil society, has a natural right to 
live without the Sabbath? We answer: He has 
not. Whether he chooses to profess the Christian 
religion or not (a point on which the State has no 
right to dictate), he is bound simply as a rational 
creature of God by the Sabbath law of the human 
race. The positions by which this argument is con- 
structed are these : 

1. While the plan of redemption is not essential 
to ground the validity of a State authority, the doc- 



90 THE CHRISTIAN SABBATH 

trine of natural theism is necessary. On the atheistic 
theory no reasonable or obligatory basis can be found 
for civic duties and allegiance ; no solid answer can 
be given to the question, " Why am I bound to obey 
the civil magistrate?" nor can any basis of morality 
safely be laid down. If atheism were true, men 
would be only ingenious animals; convenience 
might prompt them to feed in herds, but they 
would no more be suitable subjects for civil so- 
ciety than other brutes. Civil society is, while a 
temporal, essentially a moral, institution. Moral- 
ity can be established only on theism. 

2. The Sabbath, as first given to the human race, 
was an ordinance of natural theism. It was given 
to man before he was a sinner or needed a Saviour. 
It was equally enjoined on all races, and at first ob- 
served by all. Here the reader need only be referred 
to the argument of our first section. The Sabbath, 
as an institution given to men for all ages and dis- 
pensations, eVen including that of Paradise, was and 
is God's means for maintaining in the human family 
his knowledge and fear as our Maker, Ruler and 
future Judge. But on that fear all moral institu- 
tions repose — the family, the State, as truly as the 
Church. Therefore, men are naturally bound to 
keep the Sabbath simply as men, and not only 
as Christians. 

3. After man fell and came to need redemption 
the Sabbath was also continued by God as a means 
of grace and a gospel institute. But this did not 



THE CHRISTIAN SABBATH 91 

repeal or exclude its original use. The professed 
Christian has two reasons for observing the Sab- 
bath ; every human being has one. 

4. The civil legislator makes use of the books 
of Genesis and Exodus in supporting the propriety 
of his State laws for the Sabbath, not as a code of 
redemption, but as an authentic history of man's 
origin and early code of natural theism. As such, 
it is supported by all authentic tradition and his- 
tory, by the teachings of experience and the ap- 
proval of all wise and virtuous legislators who 
have known their contents. There is the same 
species of reason why this sacred history should 
guide the legislation of all States, as for the Brit- 
ish Parliament's guiding itself by Magna Charta. 

This argument, it will be noticed, gives no pre- 
text for any intermingling of the State with the 
Christian Church or any denomination in it. The 
Church is the spiritual organism of redemption. 
The State is the secular, but moral and righteous, 
organism for safety, justice and welfare in this life. 
The State is not necessarily Christian. But it is 
necessarily theistic, because on the atheistic theory 
its basis, its rights and its healthy existence are lost. 
Hence, while the Church has its use of the Sabbath 
as the institute of redemption and means of grace, 
the State has its use of it as the institute of right- 
eousness and the natural knowledge and fear of 
God. The Church accordingly enjoins and seeks 
to enforce (by her spiritual means) on her members 



92 THE CHRISTIAN SABBATH. 

the right spiritual improvement of the day. The 
State, by its secular power, enjoins and enforces the 
outward rest of the day, so that the people may (if 
they will) use it to learn of God and of his righteous 
law, to cultivate morals and decency, to rest their fac- 
ulties of body and mind, and to enjoy the ennobling 
and wholesome moral influences of the family and 
fireside. 

On this theory no man's franchises as a citizen 
are abridged on account of his failure to adopt a 
Christian profession of any name whatsoever. But 
on this theory we candidly avow the State does dis- 
countenance atheism as her necessary and radical 
antagonist. Should either Church or State there- 
fore persecute an avowed atheist ? By no means. 
Both should treat him with pity and with all the 
forbearance compatible with the duty of self-pres- 
ervation. But the State has the same right to re- 
strain him from destroying society by his atheism 
which a householder has to prevent a lunatic son 
from burning down the children's dwelling-house. 
To this catastrophe the systematic neglect of the 
Sabbath naturally tends, because it tends to the 
forgetfulness of God, the Ruler of mankind; and 
that such is its , tendency experience is the best 
proof. The only atheistic communities which have 
ever had a permanent existence in the world have 
been mere hordes of savages, like the Australians 
and Hottentots. All the civilized pagan nations 
of ancient and modern times had at least polythe- 



THE CHRISTIAN SABBATH. 93 

ism as the basis of their morals and government, 
and when religious faith was overflowed by skep- 
ticism in Athens and Rome, those republics fell- 
Twice France has seen attempts to found a civil 
government on atheistic principles. The results 
were the two Reigns of Terror. Russia now has 
an atheistic sect seeking to establish a new com- 
monwealth, and its favorite measure is assassi- 
nation. 

The sum, then, is: Theism is essential to the 
State; the Sabbath is essential to maintain the- 
ism. Therefore it is that the State can do no less 
than maintain an outward Sabbath rest. 



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